[Bug 1246364] Re: update-notifier does not show a tray icon in xubuntu 13.10

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Forest, you have suggested that this behavior is related to Unity. That
is not the case. We concluded that the notification area was a bad way
to notify people of software updates way back in 2009 -- well before
Unity was designed or developed.

That decision was based partly on usability tests, run on Gnome 2
systems that happened to require updates, where people never noticed the
icon in the notification area. I don't see how that problem would be any
better on XFCE today than it was on Gnome 2 then.

So, in Ubuntu, Software Updater should never use an indicator menu or a
notification bubble for any purpose. Now, you could say this should be
an option, so that the designers of Xubuntu and other systems can still
use one or both. Maybe the update-notifier maintainers would even agree
with you. But in February last year, I found 18 already-reported bugs in
update-notifier that are directly caused by the existence of code to
generate indicators and notification bubbles.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareUpdates#alert>

Maybe I missed some. Maybe even more have been reported since then. Some
of them affect Ubuntu even though it is not supposed to use indicator
menus or notification bubbles in the first place. And *none* of them
have been marked fixed in the past year. This is a clear example of the
cost of "let's make it an option".

I appreciate that you have spent time on your patch. I hope you can come
to see Software Updater's change in behavior as a usability improvement
for every OS that uses it, including Xubuntu, not just Ubuntu. And it
would be excellent if you could fix some of the many other bugs in
update-notifier that affect both OSes.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1246364

Title:
  update-notifier does not show a tray icon in xubuntu 13.10

Status in One Hundred Papercuts:
  Confirmed
Status in The Update Notifier:
  New
Status in “update-notifier” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  update-notifier does not show a tray icon/notification in xubuntu 13.10 anymore. Instead the software updater window appears minimized, when updates are available.
  Additionally I tried to trigger the 'System Restart Required'-notification manually by adapting /var/run/reboot-required, but no notification was displayed (although it shows up in motd).
  As a side note: I got a 'there is something wrong with updates'-notification by removing update-notifier-common while update-notifier was running.

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