Comment 78 for bug 332945

Ted Gould wrote:

Hopefully from the installer experience on you start to realize that we
want it to "just work" for everyone on the planet, not just the elite
who enjoy tweaking their computers. If you'd like to see what we think
about market share, I'd recommend Bug 1. :)

fair enough. and I was aware of Bug 1 before I wrote my tirade, so I should have known better. I'm constantly frustrated by those who don't want to put in *any* effort - there are definitely people in between them and a computer engineering student who codes for a living and loves filing bug reports - and I'm not against simplifying processes and unifying. I agree that it'd be nice if there was a framework that applications could feed into and leave rendering to the desktop; the notification system comes to mind. I also admit to not knowing much about the notification area backend. I'm a fan of customization, and I've seen where efforts to standardize something ends up completely sacrificing options to customize. It's also that... there's just those few things that shouldn't "just work", and I worry that implying that Ubuntu security is something that takes care of itself without you having to know *anything* about it creates a false sense of security. I think you should be able to draw a line at a point where you expect the user to learn something about the operating system and how it works.

Oh, and I certainly wasn't advocating every application have their own icon. If a program is running on another workspace or in the background and doesn't need to notify me of state updates or new events, it shouldn't take up any precious space on my desktop at all, in a panel or not. Is the indicator-applet cross-desktop (gnome, kde, xfce, etc)? I've asked a few questions on the indicator-applet launchpad to no avail. Maybe the update-notifier/manager should be the first application to appear in the indicator-applet? :)