Comment by PaulHoule
4 years ago
I think the tray and notification system is cruel.
When I was a kid I saw other kids torment a horse by holding a hand up, getting the horse to turn away, then slapping the horse with the other hand.
The tray is always popping up notifications that tell me to click on them but clicking on them does nothing. The notification often covers the UI elements that I need to respond to the notification. There is no way to clear the notification except to wait for the notification to be cleared.
It’s cruel, and even more cruel that if the notification isn’t just actively in the way of your work and acting on the notification but the notification frequently disappears before you can act on it and you can’t count on scrolling back and looking at it later.
I wish that operating systems (Windows, KDE) placed transient notifications in a "notification area" like older Windows and Android (before Android added popup notifications), where they don't cover up your work (like Windows/KDE/Mac notifications), you can see at a glance how many and which notifications are present (unlike Windows's Action Center with popups disabled), and remain until explicitly dismissed or responded to (unlike the current disappearing notifications).
Sadly, on Windows 10, the bottom-left of the taskbar is already used for app launchers, and the bottom-right is already occupied with a clock, volume indicators, a "system tray" for background apps that you can't close, etc. It's even worse on KDE than on Windows, since there are a lot more applets in the bottom-right of my screen, and you can't control the order of icons in your system tray. Perhaps with Windows 11 moving apps to the center of the taskbar, a row of notification icons could be added to the left.
If you're using a non-home version of Windows, open the Policy Editor, go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> All Settings, find "Remove Notifications and Action Center", enable it, and poof! Annoying distractions begone.