Bug#1107242: /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon: stops working after a bit if user doesn't dismiss bubbles

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 03 Jun 2025 at 17:08:54 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
>it seems to have a queue of at the most 20, where things
>get added if they're sent over dbus, and deleted if they're dismissed
>by the user.  But nothing else removes them.

This seems to be the same thing as https://bugs.debian.org/648378, and 
was presumably intentional (although I don't know the reasoning behind 
it). It is unlikely to be fixed, because nobody is developing 
notification-daemon any more (https://bugs.debian.org/1092972). Instead, 
desktop environments use various other implementations of the same D-Bus 
API that originated in notification-daemon.

It's part of the GNOME umbrella for historical reasons, but GNOME hasn't 
used it for around 10-15 years at this point: the implementation of the 
Notifications interface that is actually used in GNOME is part of 
gnome-shell. Similarly, other major desktop environments usually have an 
integrated implementation of Notifications, either built-in to some 
larger component (like KDE Plasma Workspace or Cinnamon) or as a 
separate service (like xfce4-notifyd).

If you are using an integrated desktop environment, I would recommend 
using its implementation of Notifications. If you are assembling your 
own desktop environment from smaller components, there are several 
non-desktop-specific implementations available such as dunst and 
notify-osd, or some of the separate services like xfce4-notifyd might 
also work outside their intended desktop environment. I am not able to 
recommend a specific implementation that would be most appropriate for 
everyone.

I think we should remove notification-daemon during the forky cycle: 
it's an excellent example of how "reference implementation" does not 
always imply "high-quality implementation for general use".

     smcv