Unity notifications messed up after installing Gnome

Solution 1:

It seems there is no priority or a single setting point to set which freedesktop notification daemon to run. I got such problem with XFCE installed on Ubuntu 14.04.

Unity notification launch xfce4-notifyd (XFCE styled notifications) as it was the default.

• Check for available notification services, example:

  $ grep -r org.freedesktop.Notifications /usr/share/dbus-1/services/
  /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.xfce4-notifyd.Notifications.service:Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
  /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service:Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
  

• Disable non needed ones, leave only the one you want, add a name extension suffix .disable:

  sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.xfce4-notifyd.Notifications.service /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.xfce4-notifyd.Notifications.service.disable
  
  pkill xfce4-notifyd
  

• Check

  notify-send test
  

If there is no Gnome service file /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.gnome.Notifications.service. Try adding notify-osd to start up applications. See How do I start applications automatically on login?. DBUS will try to launch the service only if there is no process already took that bus address ownership (org.freedesktop.Notifications).