Desktop notifications

[Stewart Williams]

Hi all,

I don't really want to have a moan, I was just wondering "why?" and to
get everyone's views.

I remember way back when Linux on the desktop was beginning to progress
faster and people were discussing how to notify the user of certain
system events. Reading various Internet blog posts, articles, websites,
etc. at the time people always bitched about how they found Windows'
desktop pop-ups/notifications in the system tray annoying while they
were working.

How come then, has Gnome and KDE both adopted similar notification
methods which in my opinion are much bigger and a lot more annoying than
any Windows notifications have ever been?

The Gnome pop-ups are clean and concise, which I like, but they are way
to big and take up too much space, thus blocking what I am doing.

In KDE (Fedora 10 + 11), the pop-ups for things such as KpackageKit
stack all the way vertically up my screen and are un-tidy, un-polished
and un-clear (I can post a screen shot if requested)

Don't get me wrong, I love Fedora, used it since FC1, but I cannot
understand why the developers have done similar things like this to
"other OS's" and IMO made them worse.

If I can help with usability in any way, I would be glad to so. I have
seen many mockup's before that are much better than the current systems.
IIRC Jakub Steiner a.k.a Jimmac has done some very good designs[1].

Sorry for the noise - Just want to make a better desktop(tm) :-)

[1] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/guimockups.php?mockup=notifications