Comment 66 for bug 346095

I read the first half of the comments, and felt the pain of other users. I'll post this first in hopes that it's useful to someone, to stop the Notify-OSD (because you can't uninstall it without breaking ubuntu-desktop) type this in a terminal:
sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.disabled

then restart your computer. they'll be gone forever. (thanks to http://www.killertechtips.com/2009/04/26/disable-notifications-in-ubuntu-904-jaunty-jackalope)

What's truly perplexing is that last line. Restart your computer, to make a chance to a setting...that sounds very much like a terrible product many of us try to avoid.

When I first saw the notify-OSD announcement, I thought: Ok, kinda cool. may be useful. Personally I used guification for pidgin, to ONLY show me when I had new messages (if I wanna know if someone's online, I'll check if they're online. If I need to know the INSTANT they're online, I'll setup a buddy-pounce...what's the point of these other notifications?)

When I upgraded to 9.04, the first thing I noticed was that I was getting way to many of those notifications for people signing on and off. so I look around for some kind of config.

 Surprise surprise, there is none. Nor is there a simple way to turn it off. Nor does killing the process help at all. In fact, I checked everything I could think of (cron, sysconfig, ~/.bash_profile) to find the sucker. nada.

I love Ubuntu. I've been using it since Warty. This was bad enough that I also ditched Ubuntu for another distro. Honestly, the mentality behind forcing users to deal with this is not the Ubuntu way. Please either give us some kind of configuration, or at the very least a simple way to disable it.