Two notification daemons installed in debian-11

[3hhh]

How to file a helpful issue

Qubes OS release

4.1, debian-11 template

Brief summary

The default debian-11 template runs different notification daemons at the same time. dbus however only supports exactly one notification daemon (otherwise it randomly decides which daemon to use). This currently leads to the absurd situation that root (mate-notification-daemon) runs a different daemon than the user (xfce4-notifyd). Therefore these notifications also have a different look & feel.

4.0 ran mate-notification-daemon only.

Steps to reproduce

Inside a deian-11 VM check ps aux|grep notify as root or grep Notifi* /usr/share/dbus-1/services/*.

I haven't checked Fedora.

Expected behavior

Exactly one daemon installed.

Actual behavior

Multiple daemons installed.

[3hhh]

Btw removing mate-notification-daemon results in the same daemon for both root and the user. Removing xfce4-notifyd will remove qubes-vm-recommended which is not what one wants... I guess this is the old issue of rpm not being able to specify packages as optional dependencies. -_-

In general users should be able to decide their own notification daemon. Currently that can only be accomplished by deleting the respective /usr/share/dbus-1/services/ file.

[DemiMarie]

I would strongly prefer mate-notification-daemon. xfce4-notifyd is buggy to the point of requiring a workaround in the GUI daemon.

[3hhh]

+1 from me for mate-notification-daemon.

However dom0 has xfce4-notifyd correctly set up, my outdated fedora-34 template oddly had no notification service at all in /usr/share/dbus-1/, but started xfce4-notifyd on notify-send from a user (not sure why) and didn't work with notify-send from root. I guess the latter would be a separate bug, but possibly upstream...

Btw it might make sense to implement an integration test for all templates and dom0 to check whether the services installed by default at /usr/share/dbus-1/services/ have a unique name. Duplicates are always bugs as this one here.

[3hhh]

dunst also looks like a good alternative for users who need notification filters etc., but probably not viable as default.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is being closed because:

• This issue is on the "Release 4.0 updates" milestone.
• Qubes OS 4.0 reached EOL (end-of-life) over one year ago.
• There has not been any activity on this issue in over one year.

If anyone believes that this issue should be reopened and reassigned to an active milestone, please leave a brief comment. (For example, if a bug still affects Qubes OS 4.1, then the comment "Affects 4.1" will suffice.)

[andrewdavidwong]

I see that the original report mentioned that this affects 4.1. Reopening.