Comment 168 for bug 390508

I think if you added up all the man-hours wasted by people trying to figure out why the timeout parameter had no effect you'd have enough to just develop a new distro from scratch. And that's not even counting the additional hours spent by those who got as far as this bug, found the "answer", and then went on to spend even more time coding up some kind of workaround.

Honestly, if the Ubuntu devs are so sure that they're the best arbiters of how long a notification should display, fine. Make ignoring the timeout the default notification behavior for the system. But for the love of God, leave some deeply buried configuration option in a text file somewhere so that those of us who trust the application's sense of timing more than yours, or are just hacking around with something for our personal systems, can turn it back on. There is zero reason not to do that, other than the sheer joy of being a controlling jerk.