Clickable Gnome-style notifications in Unity

You can have clickable notification with Unity.

Tested with 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10, 16.04 (thanks @ManseUK).

What we want

Notification are supposed to non-obstrusive, non-disrupting of your train of thought, and provide a shortcut when relevant.

Problem in Unity (12.04, 12.10 at least)

Default notification engine is notify-osd.

• notifications are not clickable (which hurts efficiency for those that offer to quickly bring you to the place of interest).
• when several happen quickly, they queue and appear only one after the other : no way to see them quickly, you just have to ... wait.

Solution

Current XFCE notifications on the other hand implement just that, and they can be used with Unity. I just tested it with a separate account (default config) to rule out any user-specific settings.

Howto

Here's how install and use XFCE4's notifications instead of Unity's:

sudo apt-get install xfce4-notifyd ; sudo apt-get purge notify-osd

To get immediate effect this may help (else logout/login):

killall -v notify-osd
/usr/lib/*/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd &

You might want to test and adjust appearance:

xfce4-notifyd-config

Sorry, this is not possible.

Ubuntu's notification system, NotifyOSD, as used by Unity, is designed to be un-clickable, in order to simplify the experience and not confuse users. There is no way to change that.

Gnome Shell, on the other hand, uses another built-in notification system that behaves differently to NotifyOSD, as explained in this LXNews article