Notifications stop appearing after a while

[cesarolea]

Hi,

First of all thank you! I'm forced to use Ubuntu at my work laptop and Regolith makes the experience very nice!

I noticed that when notifications start popping up, they are stored in a menu that is accessible through a system tray icon so you can see what you missed. However if I let them accumulate for a while, notifications will stop popping up altogether until I click the tray icon and clear all notifications.

Is there a way to force all notifications to always show as a popup on the desktop? Ideally there should be a gconf setting that I can toggle via a script, so that I can turn on/off notifications on demand (think a privacy/Do Not Disturb mode)?

On another note, do you know if it's possible to disable whatever notification daemon Gnome-Shell is using, so that I can replace it with dunst?

Thanks!

Edit: Forgot to mention that I have replaced the i3 bar and i3rocks with Polybar, and accessing the system tray that way.

[skalyan91]

I would also like to be able to use dunst, or at least customise the positioning of the notification popups.

[cesarolea]

For the "DND mode" the following can be used:

gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback notifications false

Changing it to true re-enables notifications again. This takes care of Gnome notifications, but not other sources such as notifications coming from the browser.

Haven't tried to install dunst and use that with the Gnome flashback notifications daemon disabled.

[cesarolea]

Turns out it was easier than I expected.

First you need to turn off notifications from Gnome:

gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback notifications false

Then install dunst and copy the sample config to your home directory for modification:

sudo apt install dunst
cp /etc/xdg/dunst/dunstrc ~/.config/dunst/

And that's it. Modify dunstrc to suit your needs. In my case it fixed the issue with notifications not showing up after a while, plus you can control the position, size and look and feel of the popup.

To toggle notifications on/off

#dnd on
killall -SIGUSR1 dunst

#dnd off
killall -SIGUSR2 dunst
notify-send "Do Not Disturb mode off"

It obviously is not integrated with the Regolith desktop, so dunst won't read your Xresources.

[kgilmer]

That's amazing @cesarolea ! I had tried to do something like this when I first started learning how to configure i3, but failed to integrate dunst. I may take your work in a future version of Regolith. Thank you! If you'd like a laptop sticker email me a postal address and I'll send you one or two. kgilmer at gmail.com.

[skalyan91]

@cesarolea Thanks! Disabling Gnome-flashback notifications using dconf-editor was enough to get dunst working. (I didn’t even have to manually start dunst!)

[kgilmer]

Like Rofi, the dunst developers are not interested in adding features like Xresources support because they see it complicating their Wayland future: dunst-project/dunst#357

[leosunmo]

With something like https://github.com/leosunmo/regolith-base16 we could potentially generate the Rofi/Dunst native config format using template engines that read from Xresources.

[kgilmer]

True. I'm still hoping for an Xresources-native solution and spent a few hours yesterday trying to remove all the deprecated GLib calls from notification-daemon. We'll see how it goes, but it seems like the most approachable codebase among the options that are listed on the Arch wiki page for notification front-ends.

[kgilmer]

I have added the dunst installation steps provided by @cesarolea in a new wiki HowTo: https://github.com/regolith-linux/regolith-desktop/wiki/HowTo:-Use-Dunst-to-view-notifications

[kgilmer]

This should be fixed in 1.3 w/ Rofication. Please reopen if still experiencing loss of notifications.