I'm using Kubuntu 18.04. In my system tray widget there's a "Notifications" icon. I'm a little confused about how this is supposed to work.

For example, if I use

Code: Select all

notify-send Hello

to trigger a notification, what I see is a little box pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen that contains the text of the notification, as expected. But the Notifications icon does not change: it's a light gray ! inside a circle, on a dark gray background, both before and after I send the notification. If I click on the Notifications icon, the message I sent is there in the "History" list. But why doesn't the icon itself change? If I happen to be looking away from the screen during the 5 seconds the notification is present, or I'm not around, when I get back there's no indicator that I missed a notification.

Is this by design, or is it a bug?

you can configure the notification duration, did you try that? App notifications can be left open until you click on them, so you don't miss messages or mail.
Moving this thread to Appearance and System customization subfolder.

Yeah, I can configure the duration when using notify-send, but there isn't usually any way to configure the duration of notifications sent by Chrome (e.g. Gmail) or other apps. And anyway, from a UX standpoint, putting a really long notification time isn't a great choice, because there's no sweet spot. Either the duration is short enough that I'm likely to miss it, or it's so long that I'm forced to manually dismiss notifications all the time, which is irritating. Not to mention that if several notifications occur, they take up a bunch of screen real estate.

It's hard to fathom the logic behind a notification widget that doesn't let you know when there's a pending notification. The whole point of such things is to be able to glance down for a fraction of a second and see if there's something pending. Applications in the task bar can change their icon or text to get your attention. 20 years ago, ICQ's system tray icon would change to let me know there was a pending message (and with a quick key combo I could activate and raise the message window), and countless other programs have used a similar metaphor and UX design. But with KDE the design choice seems to be popping up notifications instead of queueing them, and I'm wondering what the design logic is behind that.

You do know you have a notification history, don't you? So if you fear you miss something, cleaning your history before going afk could be a solution, no?