Comment 31 for bug 331054

I'm sorry but as someone who spends quite a lot of time working with less experienced users, alarm bells start ringing as soon as the idea of "auto-opening" windows are mentioned. New/none technically oriented users to Ubuntu and Windows alike will not be terribly comfortable with the window list anyway (as simple as it seems to anyone who has grown up with computers) and thus are unlikely to check it regularly enough to notice the sudden appearance of a new window and to presume that they will find it in the midst of other activities depends on them switching applications fluently rather than mainly using the web browser (or whatever) and then shutting down with ether of Ubuntu's excellent methods (menu on press of the hardware button or on panel) without closing every window individually. Add to this virtual desktops (which currently are only really accessible to power users, although Micro's excellent tooltip patches which have been rejected completely had the potential to change this) and some users may need to switch desktop to find it. You need to consider that users do not treat windows as a "queue" which they logically work through but rather as a "jumble" of separate entities which overlap, stuff occasionally needs to be transfered in between and which often get in each others way - using new windows as a way to ask a question (do you want to update your system?) is just ugly and neither user friendly or elegant. Whilst this behaviour is used for Apple update manager, it is one of the things Ubuntu users vividly remember as reasons why the windows desktop is so annoying.

Many aspects of the new notifications system are great (I love it with pidgin libnotify although this needs to be installed by default to get most of the benefit (even power users are lazy - they don't want to install an obscure package to befit from such a key feature and normal users will never find it)) but the lack of controls on notifications leaves a huge void as to how can applications catch users attention without driving them up the wall. The existing solution for update notifications was little better - I know many a user who never bother to look at the notification and update! Update notifications should be delivered at a standard time and in a standard place - on login seems like a good option although users should be consulted (this does raise issues e.g. are you going to be telling users to restart just after they have booted al a Windows) and if they are on startup they should lock and even cover the screen (whilst gnome etc loads in the background) to ensure that they are responded to and then continue in either a window or a persistent notification showing a progress bar (the same would be amazing if implemented for downloads, as although running downloads completely in the background would make sense if users were less impatient, having a non intrusive progress bar is the only way to make it possible for users to work on something else without them constantly checking on it, or worse loosing five minutes staring at the download manager (in my experience at least)).

Sorry for the long post and good luck in getting everything working in the best possible way for all users :-)