Comment 142 for bug 390508

> That's not true, Canonical does organize user testing sessions and watch non technical users dealing with Ubuntu.

Ok cool. I meant more specifically around notify-osd and just notifications but I know there will be a degree of user testing already going on. I also meant on the wider scale. User testing is always only ever a small sample of the user base.

> No, the current design is that notifications are unintrusive and just used to get informational content displayed. They are not used to display questions.

I understand the guidelines, and it's fairly obvious otherwise it wouldn't be a "notification" system if it did more than just notify. "Intrusive" depends on how it's used. I could fire notifications all the time. And informational, well I could just put crap in the message, or put as much text as allowed to fully expand the notification.

The use cases above define a perfectly acceptable instance where it's beneficial to be able to set the timeout, or at least have some finer grained lengths of notification. You're restricting that because you're worried about how people will mis-use it, when as mentioned above, I could totally abuse the notification system anyway. What's to stop me putting questions in, and firing it frequently (there is a limit but 50 but still).

Why not open it up, and like with messages, and frequency, write some guidelines for duration.