Clickable Gnome-style notifications in Unity

Question

I was looking for a way to get gnome style notifications in Unity. Or at least, if there´s a way of making the default Unity notifications interactive and clickable? As it is by default only a notification pops up and the user needs to find the relevant window, which I find very counterproductive.

Stéphane Gourichon · Answer 1 · 2017-02-02T13:44:32.643

You can have clickable notification with Unity.

Tested with 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10, 16.04 (thanks @ManseUK).

What we want

Notification are supposed to non-obstrusive, non-disrupting of your train of thought, and provide a shortcut when relevant.

Problem in Unity (12.04, 12.10 at least)

Default notification engine is notify-osd.

notifications are not clickable (which hurts efficiency for those that offer to quickly bring you to the place of interest).
when several happen quickly, they queue and appear only one after the other : no way to see them quickly, you just have to ... wait.

Solution

Current XFCE notifications on the other hand implement just that, and they can be used with Unity. I just tested it with a separate account (default config) to rule out any user-specific settings.

Howto

Here's how install and use XFCE4's notifications instead of Unity's:

sudo apt-get install xfce4-notifyd ; sudo apt-get purge notify-osd

To get immediate effect this may help (else logout/login):

killall -v notify-osd
/usr/lib/*/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd &

You might want to test and adjust appearance:

xfce4-notifyd-config

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 21 '13 at 16:26

8

Sorry, this is not possible.

Ubuntu's notification system, NotifyOSD, as used by Unity, is designed to be un-clickable, in order to simplify the experience and not confuse users. There is no way to change that.

Gnome Shell, on the other hand, uses another built-in notification system that behaves differently to NotifyOSD, as explained in this LXNews article

edited Nov 21 '13 at 16:26

Cas

8,707

answered Feb 09 '12 at 03:45

Gabriel Mazetto

254

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 17 '22 at 08:57

Tested on Ubuntu Unity 18.04

You do not need to purge or remove notify-osd to switch to xfce4-notifyd. You can simply change the default notification utility.

Before you begin, install xfce4-notifyd by running the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install xfce4-notifyd

Next, run the following command to edit your default, dbus notification-service configuration file:

sudo nano /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service

Then, edit the file to look like this:

[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
# Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/notify-osd
Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd
SystemdService=xfce4-notifyd.service

_{If you notice, the 3rd line is commented out and the last two lines are added to the original file.}

When you are done editing, press CTRL+o to save the file and then press CTRL+x to exit nano.

Finally, reboot to apply the changes.