Comment 3 for bug 1624181

So yesterday I experienced an epiphany. I was making a quick script and realized it would be best if it used notifications to tell me some stuff. But notifications weren't working at all. That's when I realized, I haven't seen notifications in a loooong while. This affected my ubuntu experience negatively. For example, I have lately performed system updates much more rarely than before. I am a long time ubuntu user, I started back when it was called Breezy.

I spent the last 12 hours googling and googling researching why on earth notifications don't work anymore. I tried everything. Closing Firefox. Moving back to a single monitor setup. And sometimes notficiations came back, but briefly. This was driving me crazy until I found an answer that mentioned video playback. Right, ever since I have two monitors, I almost always have a youtube playback open (often for music). Needless to say, this design flaw really bit me hard.

I suspect this problem is much larger than it first appears. It might be affecting many users, but they don't notice, because they just don't realize notifications are missing. How would I know if I missed a notification?

It's not like there aren't any ways to improve the situation. Just add a dconf-editor entry to ignore video playback. You can even extend the thing and detect the case where there are multiple monitors, so if there's a video playing, just show the notification in another screen. Or how about, once the video playback ends, you show all the missed notifications? Honestly the worst problem with all of this is how there's no way to know that those notifications ever happened.