[Bug 1246364] Re: update-notifier does not show a tray icon in xubuntu 13.10

[Forest]

Matthew, I appreciate that you're genuinely trying to make things
better, and that you're being communicative here.

However, the statement, "we concluded that the notification area was a
bad way to notify people," pretty much sums up the problem here: It
might seem like a bad way for you, but it is definitely not a bad way
for everyone. The change took many of us from something that was working
quite well to something that works quite badly in comparison. In other
words, it essentially broke things for existing users, which in software
development is generally a sign of a bad change.

I'm not the least bit surprised to learn that this change was made in
reaction to usability tests and focus groups, since those are notorious
for failing to represent real-world usage. Obviously, this is an example
of such a failure, since we already have a dozen people on the "affects
me" list of this bug report, and those are just the ones who have enough
technical knowledge and motivation to realize what happened, figure out
the name of the debian package responsible for the notifications, search
for it on launchpad.net, find this bug report, create or log in to an
account here, and register the fact that they are affected. Considering
the hurdles involved, I think it's safe to say that each person on the
"affects me" list represents quite a few others who are unhappy with
this change (or will be once they get around to upgrading from Raring or
Precise).

My comment about Unity was not meant to suggest that the problem is
caused by Unity. I only mean that this is not the first time since Unity
was introduced that seemingly Unity-centric changes have been made that
negatively impact non-Unity users. (The previous example that comes to
mind is liferea having been modified to get rid of its notification tray
icon, which is fine on Unity, but leaves the application completely
inaccessible on other desktops!) In this case, there are at least two
specific problems with the "new" update-notifier behavior on non-Unity
systems:

1. When "unimportant" updates become available, update-notifier's only
way of notifying the user is now to show a box on the Unity launcher. If
the user is not using Unity, this might appear as a small and extremely
easy to miss button on a narrow bar at the bottom of the screen (if the
user happens to have a desktop panel that shows running tasks), or
nothing at all (if the user doesn't happen to have/want a task bar on
his desktop). This makes update-notifier effectively useless on such
desktops, because it is not only failing to put a notification in the
place where we look for notifications, it is actually not notifying the
user in any useful way at all.

2. When "important" updates become available, update-notifier pops up a
dialog box, immediately interrupting the user from whatever he was
doing, which is very irritating. (I'm trying to remember whether it also
steals keystrokes from other applications in which the user might be
typing, as pop-up dialogs usually do, but I don't know how to trigger
this behavior right now.)

As for bugs that you say were "directly caused by the existence of code
to generate indicators and notification bubbles", I would suggest that
the proper solution for such things is to fix the bugs, not to rip out
critical parts of the software upon which users depend. If fixing them
is difficult due to code complexity, perhaps a good compromise would be
to simplify the code without eliminating the important bits. For
example, I could get along just fine without notification bubbles, so
long as an icon still appeared in my notification tray and allowed me to
click it to see what updates are available.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1246364

Title:
  update-notifier does not show a tray icon in xubuntu 13.10

Status in One Hundred Papercuts:
  Confirmed
Status in The Update Notifier:
  New
Status in “update-notifier” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  update-notifier does not show a tray icon/notification in xubuntu 13.10 anymore. Instead the software updater window appears minimized, when updates are available.
  Additionally I tried to trigger the 'System Restart Required'-notification manually by adapting /var/run/reboot-required, but no notification was displayed (although it shows up in motd).
  As a side note: I got a 'there is something wrong with updates'-notification by removing update-notifier-common while update-notifier was running.

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