Improve qube indication in the notifications proxy

[marmarek]

How to file a helpful issue

The problem you're addressing (if any)

The qubes-notification-proxy currently just prepends the qube name to the notification text. It's not very well visible. Old notification approach (notification daemon in each qube) had small colorful border around each notification - while not having full qube name, including the color was IMO a good idea to quickly distinguish notifications from different qubes.

The solution you'd like

Include qube color in the notification somewhere. The easiest thing to do is probably to simply use qube's icon as the notification icon. And if the notification has an icon already, merge those two (add qube's own icon as an overlay in the right bottom corner, over the original notification icon).
And maybe also make the qube name more distinct (in bold? or something?).

The value to a user, and who that user might be

All users, since the qubes-notification-proxy is considered to be default in R4.3.

Completion criteria checklist

(This section is for developer use only. Please do not modify it.)

[marmarek]

@marmarta we have discussed this. Today, but also some months ago somewhere (Matrix?). Feel free to comment if I missed anything.

[marmarta]

The notification should also get the colored border (please don't tell me that "ooh, we can't actually do it easily over wayland", I don't care, if wayland can't do anything we shouldn't be using it).

Everything that comes from a VM has a colored border so this needs one too.

EDIT: fine, you convinced me that it's not technologically feasible. I still think it should have one, but begrudgingly: fine.

[UndeadDevel]

An idea: what if qube notifications would display with a button (i.e. notify-send -A option), like "suppress notifications from this qube"? E.g. notify-send -A Yes -A No -A "Suppress notifications from this qube" "Execute task?" "Execute your scheduled task xyz now?", which shows that two additional buttons "from the qube" can be displayed also; the proxy would then relay the answer except if the third button is pressed, in which case it will stop serving notifications from that qube.
That would make it even more obvious, even without a border, that the notification isn't from dom0, but I haven't looked at how the proxy works, so maybe that's not possible, either.

[marmarta]

There is one small issue with the additional button: it won't be that obvious where to put the option to enable those back (hard to discover); we'd also need to test how it looks with multiple buttons if a notification by itself gives you two or three buttons.

[UndeadDevel]

There is one small issue with the additional button: it won't be that obvious where to put the option to enable those back (hard to discover)

I think intuitively users would look either in Qubes Global Config (if a "Notifications" tab were added there) or in the regular per-qube settings.

we'd also need to test how it looks with multiple buttons if a notification by itself gives you two or three buttons.

Extreme case:

[marmarta]

That looks good (and good point on global config)

[UndeadDevel]

I'll add a less extreme case with three qube buttons and the full desktop in view:

So it does inflate the size of notifications with buttons noticeably, but only if there's buttons in the notification from the qube's side, which normally isn't the case:

[marmarek]

NetworkManager notifications already have "don show again" button, see https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/121782#step/firstboot/72. It will be quite confusing to have two such buttons on a single notification...

[marmarta]

I don't agree - there is a difference between "Suppress future notifications from this qube" (subject to rewording by a less-wordy native speaker) and "Don't show this notification in the future"

[marmarek]

What if VM will really try to put a button "Suppress future notifications from this qube" too? (possibly with intentional typo, to bypass potential check for exact same wording)

[UndeadDevel]

What if VM will really try to put a button "Suppress future notifications from this qube" too? (possibly with intentional typo, to bypass potential check for exact same wording)

I suppose the user would know that the right-most button is the one always added, unless the user hasn't used that Qubes version for long, but in any case: the button is supposed to enable the user to stop a kind of DOS attack on the notification system, right? So even if the user clicks the wrong button first, the next time the user will likely try the other one.

For reference (didn't find the proper icon):

As for the wording: the shortest I can come up with is Stop this qube's notifications (or Shut this qube up 😆 ), but I find Suppress notifications from this qube or Turn notifications from this qube off to be best, personally. The word future is not needed IMO, as time only goes one way, so it's clear that suppressing that qube's notifications applies to the future.

[DemiMarie]

The notification should also get the colored border (please don't tell me that "ooh, we can't actually do it easily over wayland", I don't care, if wayland can't do anything we shouldn't be using it).

This is actually doable, if we patch the notification daemon. I expect that the patch will not be upstreamable.