GNOME: Use alternative notification service

README.md

GNOME: Use alternative notification service

The GNOME-Shell process hosts its own notification service, which makes it a bit tricky to use a different one. The following hacks worked fine for GNOME 3.26.

Instructions

Find and install a notification daemon that is able to steal the notification bus name from GNOME-Shell, and make it start with the session. I used the daemon from the notification-daemon package with the --replace parameter. I start the daemon from an infinite loop because it exits after a few minutes of inactivity. To use the same setup as mine, copy notification-daemon.desktop into ~/.config/autostart/.

If your notifications daemon only implements the org.freedesktop.Notifications D-BUS interface, you need to prevent GNOME-Shell to own the org.gtk.Notifications bus name. Copy disable-notifs.conf into /usr/share/dbus-1/session.d/ to forbid any application to use this bus name.

disable-notifs.conf

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!-- Disable GNOME-style notifications (org.gtk.Notifications) -->

<!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC
 "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
<busconfig>
  <policy context="default">
    <deny own="org.gtk.Notifications"/>
  </policy>
</busconfig>

notification-daemon.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=
Exec=sh -c 'while true; do /usr/lib/notification-daemon-1.0/notification-daemon -r; sleep 1; done'
Hidden=true
Name=Standalone notification daemon
NoDisplay=false
Type=Application
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true