Comment 24 for bug 1246364

Forest, you have suggested that this behavior is related to Unity. That is not the case. We concluded that the notification area was a bad way to notify people of software updates way back in 2009 -- well before Unity was designed or developed.

That decision was based partly on usability tests, run on Gnome 2 systems that happened to require updates, where people never noticed the icon in the notification area. I don't see how that problem would be any better on XFCE today than it was on Gnome 2 then.

So, in Ubuntu, Software Updater should never use an indicator menu or a notification bubble for any purpose. Now, you could say this should be an option, so that the designers of Xubuntu and other systems can still use one or both. Maybe the update-notifier maintainers would even agree with you. But in February last year, I found 18 already-reported bugs in update-notifier that are directly caused by the existence of code to generate indicators and notification bubbles. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareUpdates#alert>

Maybe I missed some. Maybe even more have been reported since then. Some of them affect Ubuntu even though it is not supposed to use indicator menus or notification bubbles in the first place. And *none* of them have been marked fixed in the past year. This is a clear example of the cost of "let's make it an option".

I appreciate that you have spent time on your patch. I hope you can come to see Software Updater's change in behavior as a usability improvement for every OS that uses it, including Xubuntu, not just Ubuntu. And it would be excellent if you could fix some of the many other bugs in update-notifier that affect both OSes.