14 DAY TRIAL // Recent reports show us that a known Ubuntu bug, which was submitted to Canonical’s Launchpad bug-tracking website about half a decade ago, still exists in the current version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system and Canonical refuses to fix it for unknown reasons.
The Launchpad bug is entitled “notifyOSD ignores the expire timeout parameter” and has been submitted by Romanian user Adrian Roman on June 22, 2009, as part of the Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) release. It appears that NotifyOSD does not support timeouts, despite the fact that a “-t” option exists in the manual page of the program. This makes notify-osd unusable for certain apps that need to control the timeout of the notification.
“As I understand the code, the ‘expire_timeout’ variable is first initialized with a default, then the same value is used later to define an array and then to set the expiration timeout for the notification,” says Adrian Roman in a comment on Launchpad. “Anyway, regardless of where the problem lies, the expiration timeout can only be the default ‘5 seconds’ - there's no way to change this value.”
We need a better, customizable notification system in Ubuntu
As long-time Ubuntu users, we can’t say that we have encountered any weird issues with the distribution or that we know about some bugs that annoy us. But we do understand the issue reported by Adrian Roman and backed by numerous other Ubuntu users worldwide. At the moment, the respective Launchpad bug has over 250 comments and counting.
We also believe that Canonical should make that notification system more customizable in future versions of Ubuntu, because any other desktop environment out there that has pop-up notifications allows the user to control them in some way or another, either by adding a simple close button or by implementing an option in the Control Panel that lets users adjust the timeout for notifications.