What notification daemon are you actually using?

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Most of the time, my laptop sits in sleep or hibernate. I might not open it for hours and often not for a day or two.

As some of you know, recently I switched from GNOME to XFCE. I noticed that sometimes for a couple of days, when I unlock it, I get a wall of notifications that covers a most of the screen. Every forum notification, every email, every system notification, every random thing that fired off while in standby, all stacked, all popping at once. Kind of annoying lol.

I searched online and found others complaining about this but no solution for xfce4-nodifyd.

xfce4-notifyd is default. But there’s no setting to limit how many bubbles show on resume. No “show me the last 3 and stash the rest.” No auto-DND while the screen is locked. I checked the Xfce project for issues and the source. It’s not hidden in there somewhere. Probably I’m missing something?

Anyway, I started looking at what else exists for desktop notifications and I’m curious what folks here are actually running.

A few I’ve come across:

  • Dunst. It has a notification_limit setting (literally the feature I want), dunstctl set-paused for programmatic pausing, and a history pop with a keybind. No GUI, just a text config. Built for tiling WM but would work fine on XFCE. I used it in the past on i3.
  • Deadd Notification Center. Slide-out pane, But the project’s slowed down. Last update +1 year go.
  • SwayNotificationCenter. Despite the name, it runs on X11. Proper notification center, grouping, DND. More setup though.

What are you running, and on what DE or WM? If on XFCE4-notifyd, any tips to address this?

Not really looking for “just use DND” answers. :smile: That option exists. I’m more interested in how people who think about this stuff have set things up. I want to capture all past notifications but only show the most recent when resuming desktop. Then I can view all in the logs if I want to see everything that happened:

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Cleared it, before opening this topic. But the logs should be the only place I can look back to view all notifications since previous login.

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While I ALSO use Xfce when I’m using any distro OTHER THAN antiX, and I occassionally use KDE Plasma, just to see what they are doing, if and when I leave my laptop alone, it’s NOT while I’m in either Xfce or Plasma, so I don’t have to deal with those unwanted notifications at all.

With a simple window manager configuration, (generally IceWM), I simply run an xlock command utility, and I set it up to display analog clocks on the locked screen; that’s it!

Now I KNOW that most people have “bought the Kool Aid” that companies have been selling for decades, and those software companies collude with the hardware vendors to make ever more resource intensive applications and tools, forcing us to buy more and more “horsepower”.

For me, I finally determined that these things were simply unnecessary for me.

Why, you may ask? The answer is remarkably simple: all I really do with my computer the majority of the time is read Email or write notes in forums; that’s 95-97% of what I do. Sure, on occasion I want to watch a sporting event. For example, tonight I want to watch the Celtics and the 76ers in Game 6 of their first round in the NBA Eastern Conference playoffs, but MOST of the time I watch on TV if possible, and if not, I picked up a Google Pixel Tablet (watching on my phone is possible, but the screen is just too small; the tablet isn’t huge, but the resolution is surprisingly good, so I can use it in a pinch (might have to tonight; the game isn’t on regular TV; I’d have to get “Peacock” if I wanted to watch on TV; of all the streaming services, Peacock seems to charge the most and we did NOT add Peacock; anyway, I RARELY use the computer to watch games, but sometimes I will bring up a video to watch REPLAYS later of baseball, basketball or football games.

The other thing I enjoy doing is experimenting with text editors.

I now ask you: if I am being honest, why on Earth would I need a heavy desktop environment to chew up valuable cycles on my systems? I like good hardware, but I usually get 2-4 year old hardware to limit my expense, so adding a desktop and slowing it down is the last thing I need.

No, I am definitely not your average computer user in this day and age!

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@hydn : Try the default notification of MATE: Ayatana indicators

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Ok so following up on this. I ended up with a script workaround instead of switching daemons, mostly because xfce4-notifyd’s panel log is actually fine as a backlog viewer. The problem was never the log. It was the flood of popups on unlock/resume that was driving me nuts lol.

How xfce4-notidyd behaves now:

  • Lock screen enabled (manually, idle timeout, suspend, hibernate, lid-close) → DND enabled, no popups.
  • Lock screen unlock → DND turns off, popups resume.
  • Notifications that arrived while locked are still in the notification log (panel bell icon, or xfce4-notifyd-config).

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Will see if this solves in a day or two.

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dunst on X11
mako on wayland

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Dunst is pretty solid. Never heard of mako, thanks!