I'm using KDE 4.10.5 on Ubuntu 12.04.

I have searched the internet in vain to find an answer to this question. It involves the "Notifications" widget/plasmoid.

I wonder if there is a way to disable the *accumulation* of notifications. I get them mostly from Thunderbird, the Gmail plasmoid, and calibre. I don't mind seeing the notifications, I just don't like having to clear them every time I sit down (e.g. there might be 10 in the list; I know I can clear them all at once with a single click, but I don't even want to see them). I know I can disable them from certain programs in the KDE settings, which is not what I'm looking for. Oddly, however, I don't see the program "Thunderbird" listed under the KDE settings -- but that is a different topic.

I have seen no option to do this; that is, to just show them real-time as they appear but do not collect them.

Will I have to use a different notification widget or remove them all?

Thanks for any help...

Unfortunately it is intended that you cannot prevent them from accumulating. There are two types of notifications - persistent and non-persistent notifications. Non-Persistent notifications will only be displayed once, and will disappear forever afterwards. Persistent notifications however will be accumulated until removed manually.

As for why Thunderbird is not listed - that is likely because it is not using the KDE Notifications framework. KDE is able to display it's notifications due to an XDG specification concerning the display of notifications.

The only way I can see for you here is an alternative Notifications widget which disregards the persistence flag (although i'm not aware of any) unfortunately.

Thanks for the explanation of the persistent and non-persistent notifications, bcooksley.

I think I must have had the original KDE 4.8 released with Kubuntu 12.04 for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to add the Kubuntu Backports repository and was upgraded to 4.10.5.

Notifications behaved differently in 4.8 in that they did not accumulate, but I guess I will just have to get used to it in 4.10.5 now. I get the most of them from gmail-plasmoid, so I will see if I can disable notifications via KDE settings for that app. All I really care about is the gmail-plasmoid icon turning red when I get email -- so maybe that is one workaround. I will have to check if there is a custom setting for Thunderbird.

Persistent notifications used to be auto-removed after a set time (30 minutes or so), but I'm not sure if it's still the case with recent Plasma versions.