Notification popups don't last enough to be correctly read

[Anonym25712]

Currently these popups last for something like 5-6 seconds, which is way too short. If I'm reading a web page or writing an e-mail, by the time I finish reading the current sentence or writing the current word, the popup disappears before I'm done reading it.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in notify-osd.
For future reference you might be interested to know that a lot of applications have bug reporting functionality built in to them. This can be accessed via the Report a Problem option in the Help menu for the application with which you are having an issue. You can learn more about this feature at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Travis Whitaker (pi-boy-travis)]

Confirmed. There is no way (I know of) to change anything about the new notifications. Recommended importance: Medium.

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

Enforcing the timings stated in the spec is something we want to implement for Karmic.

[Diego Moya (turingt)]

Setting a longer show time will not solve this bug for me. The time might be close to expiration when I stop working with an application and want to read the notification.

It also won't solve the case for notifications that would take *minutes* to mentally process, like the one I had this week:

- I received a notification saying more or less that "The sound system *A-89853xx##* is not working. Switching to sound system *B-IFX99L337* instead".
- When I was still trying to read the names of the failing components in order to make sense of the sentence, the notification began fading.
- I tried to keep the message from disappearing. My gut reaction was placing the mouse over the notification (the standard behavior for fading popups is to stop fading). Alas, placing the mouse on Ubuntu's notifications make them *unreadable*.
- Of course, when a notification disappears, it's gone. Forever. The sad thing is, that's *intentional*.

By design there isn't a place in the interface where one can go to read previous notifications. I know this was a bold design decision by the Ubuntu team, and I understand the rationale behind it. The problem is, *it's not working*. Either show only notes that we won't miss when they're gone (volume-bright up/down are fine), or provide a way to recover the alerts we do care about.

There must be a way to make notifications persistent so that they can be properly read. A simple log in the system tray would make wonders.

[Diego Moya (turingt)]

I've found there's a Messaging Menu being developed to centralize all message sources at one point:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MessagingMenu

This would be the perfect place to put the persistent log I mentioned earlier. An application that would play "catch-all" (store all messages from notify-osd that don't belong to any of the other messaging applications) would solve my "disappearing information" problem.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The messaging menu is intended solely for human-to-human communications.

I hope we can agree that a message of the form "The sound system *A-89853xx##* is not working. Switching to sound system *B-IFX99L337* instead" should not have been presented in a notification bubble of any sort, vanishing or not. Please report that as a bug in whatever program emitted it. ~/.cache/notify-osd.log records recent notification bubbles for debugging purposes like these.