Comment 158 for bug 390508

> That's a pretty ridiculous thing to suggest to developers planning to distribute their code

If you plan to distribute something, you'll have to live with the lowest-common-denominator problem, and cannot rely on implementation details. Just like everywhere else.

I don't see how it's ridiculous to recommend to use the tools that suit you the best. On the other hand, I find it pretty ridiculous to actually try to force your idea of good design to every single project out there, although alternative implementation do already exist.

> there's something I can manually edit to remove this dependency
> so I can switch to notification-daemon and still keep ubuntu-desktop?

You seem to misunderstand the role of the ubuntu-desktop package. It's just a meta package that does nothing more than reference other packages, and brings you a default ubuntu desktop. You don't loose anything by not having that installed, and in fact you cannot have it installed if you want to remove referenced packages. There's nothing in that package except dependancies.

However, you may very well have multiple daemons installed. In that case, the choice of deamons is made by normal D-Bus activation; in this case the system wide config file is /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service