Comment 191 for bug 390508

"bealer, opensource based doesn't mean you can't take design decisions or choices, we could try to fix every applications and blame random softwares installed from the internet for making ubuntu bug or we can enforce some design choices we believe benefit our users and communication to software writers on our design choice and how to well integrate with our system, it's what other very people device makers do for their system as well and users don't complain so much about the limitations since in the end it leads to things working nicely together in a consistent way"

@Seb of course you have to make design decisions, that's part of software development. From the look of all the responses, people turning away from or hacking the notifications, I would say it's a poor design decision or one that needs to be reviewed. Especially if you want to encourage development in the community.

One could argue that developers will go off and use other notification systems which in itself means less consistency. Exactly the thing you were trying to stop.

Developers are putting forward examples and reasons why they would like a more granular timeout. Some good, some bad. But it's such use cases that should contribute towards making a design decision.

What would be interesting to see is the research and reasoning behind the current design decision. How do you know one length of timeout for all things benefits the user, or was it a decision plucked out of the air?

Simplest fix, at least correct the documentation then I bet you'd end up with a lot fewer comments here!