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Notifications, whether on desktop or mobile, may seem like the minutiae of an application but that’s because most of us are accustomed to our platform choice have a uniform look and feel that seemlessly pulls everything together.
Developers, for the most part, have to tools to build their products to fit within a given ecosystem and appear right at home as if designed specifically for the given OS or application. If you’re a Mac user, you have MacOS-esque notifications. Windows users can spot a Microsoft notification from across the room.
Chromebooks had inherently adopted Google’s Material Design style which is rapidly becoming more and more like that of Android as the line between the two systems blurs.
One operating system, however, tends to be left out in the cold when it comes to the slick, polished look that comes with these native features.
Linux may not be a household name for many of you but chances are you are using it as we speak. Android and Chrome OS both take advantage of the Linux kernel and a vast majority of cloud services, super-computers and giant corporate infrastructures are just a few examples of Linux at work.
I’ll spare you the 25-year history of what Linux is all about but if you’d like to read more about what it is and what it can do check out the link below.
Being that Linux is strongly steeped in the development community, things like UI, native notifications and such are often cast aside to focus on more consumer-based platforms like Windows or Mac. John Q. Public wants a friendly user experience and, since that’s where the money’s at, that’s who gets priority.
In early May of this year, the Chromium project launched a native notification system for MacOS that allows Macs to serve up notifications in the traditional “Appley” manner. Native notification. Smoother work-flow. Happy consumer.
Linux, sadly, received no love from the Chromium project despite a feature request for native notifications almost a year ago. The good news is that despite the low priority of the request (priority 3 with 3 being the lowest and 0 being the highest), a recent commit in the Chromium repository appears to be finally adding the feature.
Enable native notifications on desktop Linux
In the commit we see that this is just a “dry run” for testing but it is plain to see the native notification feature should soon find its way to the Stable release of Chrome for Linux and that’s great news for our friend Tux the Linux penguin.
With any luck, we will hear some news from the Chromium blog on when to expect this update and what developers need to do in order to migrate to the new featrue. Stay tuned for more.
