Ubuntu

Notifications in KDE
Aurélien Gâteau on Ayatana notifications in plasma:

The idea of this patch is to provide an alternative experience for passive notifications (aka without actions) in Plasma, while retaining the current interface for active notifications. When “Lighter passive notifications” is enabled in the configuration of the system tray plasmoid, passive notifications appear in the top-right corner, and are queued: if three notifications come at the same time, they are displayed one after the other to reduce spamming. These notifications use the Plasma tooltip background so that they are well integrated in the desktop, while looking “lighter” than the regular notifications. The notifications smoothly fade in on start and fade out when done. They also fade out when moving the mouse over them.

Discussion in kde-core-devel:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=125146818810377&w=2 http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=125148565613704&w=2

Discussion in plasma-devel:

http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2009-September/008108.html

Details:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=125372774608408&w=2 when you look at the patches to dozens of applications that are necessary to make this all work properly and how it makes Ubuntu systems very different in behavior from other F/OSS offerings resulting in a fracturing of the user experience in an already small market (the phrase that springs to my mind is "dividing one's own house so that others may more easily do the conquering"), the reason for the fuss becomes more apparent.