Please let me turn off ALL notification popups

Hello,

I have just run update manager in Ubuntu and after it had run I was presented with a very rude yellow "popup" informing me something along the lines of "Your system requires restarting, press the notification are to restart your system".

Sorry ? No thank you. It is *MY* computer and *I* will decide when I restart it. I am currently in the middle of working thankyou very much.

Firstly I would therefore like to know why this popup does not have an option for me to tell it to "go away you rude popup or I will smite thee a mighty blow to the kidneys with my axe" ?

Secondly there is also a perfectly good "shut down" item available on my task bar, I'll use this when I want to restart my machine thankyou. I'm quite capable of doing this myself.

Sorry but this notification area is an absolute bloody nuisance. It is a very, very bad idea that has simply been copied from Microsoft Windows XP without thinking about how to implement this functionality in a decent manner. The whole reason that Windows is so fundamentally unusable is that every 10 seconds some stupid program jumps to the foreground and steals focus demanding you attend to it now (usually some mindless update zombie, that's hooked itself into your system startup, trying to check for updates to some two bit text viewing utility...). It's like having a pack of hyperactive children running around then coming and screaming in your face whilst you're trying to read a book. Ubuntu does not need this design philosophy being copied in from Windows. Leave the crap where it belongs.

Personally I do not ever want to see these yellow popups so I wish to have a simple, consistent, accessible way to configure my system so that it does not show them EVER. Honeslty I wouldn't care if my CPU is on fire and it's about to explode and kill me. I DO NOT want to see a popup on my desktop. They're as mindless as the dialogues that pop up to ask "Are you sure you want to quit my precious application ?" when you 're closing an app that isn;t an editor and doesn't have unsaved data.

Of course other people may like them so the obvious answer is to make popups totally user configurable. In other words I should be able to go to either gnome-control-center or to a menu item in "Preferences" and there should be an applet for notification behaviour where I can configure the notification area with something like the following options:

1 Display notifications until I dismiss them.

2 Display them for "x" seconds then automatically dismiss them (where "x" is user configrable) - I would suggest this should probably be the default with "x" being given a value of either 20 or 30 seconds.

3 Do not display any notification popups ever for any reason whatsoever. Nada. None. Zilch. No exceptions for any application whatsoever even if the machine is about to explode etc. etc..

Additionally the notification must *NEVER* tell me that I *HAVE* to do something. Don't be so bloody rude ! It is *MY* computer, running on *MY* electricity and *I* decide what happens on it. It may wish to inform me that something requires my attention but it must never try to force me to take an action. It should also never be able to perform tasks such as rebooting simply by clicking the area. One inadvertent click and I would have lost a lot of work this morning.

Leave the nannying "we know best", "do this now" attitude to Microsoft Windows where it belongs. If you do not you will also start turning people off Linux. Most people I know are sick of Windows because of all this sort of crap. They feel like they're serving their computer not the other way round. I am not going to be able to get them to try Ubuntu if all they're going to get is more of the same. Ubuntu Linux is supposed to be better than Windows, not a catch up "me too" clone.

Enough of flashing icons, popups, continuous questions etc. etc. A good computer is a quiet computer. After all I am the one using the computer, it is not using me.

Thankyou.