Comment 78 for bug 390508

Let's calm down, people. This is a bug report, not a place to vent your disappointment with ubuntu.

There are two things at issue here, variable delays, and lack of merging for notifications sent by notify-send.

It is clear that the ubuntu people in general do not wish to address the second issue, on the grounds that that would cause disparity between applications. I feel that forcing the whole ecosystem to use a fixed set of parameters by simply ignoring their requests is a bad idea: this should be patched for each application individually. However, this position is understandable, although a finer grain would be nice, instead of simply having "normal" and "urgent".

The second one is clearly a bug (or rather, a design flaw that should be addressed as a bug). This has been reported a few times ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd/+bug/434913 and the bugs cited by elijah). I believe this would be very simple to fix: as far as I remember, libnotify only merges if three things match :
- the notification ID, which is _not_ kept by notify-send between invocations
- title of notification
- sender app

The point is that the first one prevents replacing with notify-send. I think the last two criteria should be more than enough to filter false positive, so that the criteria for notification ID could be removed with no side effects, allowing notifications to be merged with notify-send.

In the meantime, I use gnome-osd, which is quite nice, less buggy, and with more features (albeit less pretty), than libnotify.