Comment 196 for bug 390508

Okay, this affects me too. I depend on the expire timeout parameter for the same reason as another developer noted. I have my own scripts that notify me of interesting things through notify-send (with a 10 minute expiry, for example). I like the luxury of making myself a cup of tea and returning to my computer, confident that my notifications of interest will still be there, ready to be dismissed with the click of my mouse.

My workaround is to:

1. Uninstall and forget about notify-osd and notification-daemon
2. Install the sensible and reasonable xfce4-notifyd, which respects the expiry timeout
3. You may have to pkill notify-osd to really get rid of it.
4. You'll know it's working when you notify-send and you get a strange looking grey notification.
5. Run xfce4-notifyd-config and select the Smoke theme to make it look better

And, if you're running xmonad, you'll need step 6 because for all its merits, xfce4-notifyd seems to grab the focus when it appears. Not only that, but it's only visible on the current workspace, whereas I want to see it on all my workspaces, as was notify-osd's behaviour. For this, you need to tweak your xmonad.hs

import XMonad.Actions.CopyWindow

....

myManageHook :: ManageHook

myManageHook = composeAll [
    className =? "Xfce4-notifyd" --> doF W.focusDown <+> doF copyToAll
    ]

... etc... Haskell is tough. You may have to adapt this to your specific xmonad.hs file, but that's the idea.