I have been using MATE since around January this year and have been really enjoying its ease of use. I am trying to get pop up notifications using a calendar and reminder application so that I can remind myself of appointments and regular tasks on my to do list. However unfortunately I cannot get pop up notifications on MATE. I have both Gnome calendar and Korganizer installed and I have set up reminder requests for both of them at particular times of the day yet no pop up notification is generated at that time for either Gnome calendar or Korganizer.
I have gone through all the menus and nothing seems to fix the problem. The only thing I found that I could find mentioning notifications was under System; Preferences; Look and Feel; Popup Notifications. The Slider theme was already enabled. I tried each of the other 3 themes but they didn’t enable pop ups. “Enable do not disturb” was already unticked. I ticked it and unticked it again but nothing happened. I have daily tasks set up and old calendar appointments set up, and had both Gnome calendar and Korganizer open at the time of trying these things, such that pop up notifications for old events and tasks would have shown up if those things had enabled pop ups.
However when I switch to Plasma, it does generate the pop up notifications. This is why I am wondering whether it is a MATE issue. It doesn’t seem to be a MATE-KDE compatability issue as pop up notifications are not being generated with Gnome calendar either. I haven’t found other posts about this on this forum.
I’ve also tried using the Reminders application but that seems to be very buggy (most of the time it doesn’t even launch!) It seems many people have that issue with it. That is why I am trying to use Korganizer for my tasks. And Gnome calendar for events and appointments.
I am using Debian 12.8 (stable). I hope this is all clear, if not please let me know.
Thank you very much ugnvs and jymm. I am not technical so I will ask someone to help me to install Thunderbird with the Lightning addon and report back
The request interest me. I’ll use chatgpt to try to create an applet for the mate panel, to add this feature. I’ll come back with it to test with you.
To me, it is a MATE issue. I’m experiencing the same issue with other software and system tasks. I’m on Ubuntu MATE 24.04.3.
For the last 3 years I’ve been on Xubuntu, followed by a few months on Ubuntu, before coming back to Ubuntu MATE. On both XFCE and Gnome, notifications showed up just fine, whenever I plugged in a pendrive or external disk, when I mounted or unmounted it, when I was listening to music either on Rhythmbox or Audacious (to name a few), but none of that happens on MATE, at least on my desktop. “Do not disturb” is disabled. Weird thing is, when I click on the Notifications icon, the notifications are there, they just do not pop up.
I wonder if I’m missing something… is there any gsettings command, or maybe something can be done through Dconf Editor? Maybe it is an issue on Indicator Applet Complete? Will try a few things later.
That’s interesting Claudio. I looked into the Thunderbird option but it requires cloud and I like to have all my appointments and tasks locally on my computer. That was why I had set up Gnome calendar and Korganizer. Evolution seems to allow you to store everything locally although it seems to require you to sync with an email. Of course it would be great if events on the Gnome calendar and tasks on the Korganizer would generate pop ups!
Thanks a lot ugnvs, that’s great that you don’t have to have them on the cloud! I am a bit cautious about having my tasks and calendar tied to my email account but it sounds like you have to use an email account to use Thunderbird. That was why I had liked the standalone Gnome calendar and Korganizer. But it sounds like Thunderbird or Evolution will be the only options, requiring an email account to be associated with them. And thanks a lot for trying to generate the pop up notifications on MATE Philippe! Perhaps some day it will be possible to have pop up notifications on MATE, like with Plasma - which does give pop up notifications…
I could be wrong (and frequently am), but if you're game, can you try something? From a terminal window, issue the following command and see whether a notification pops up?
notify-send "Hello, World!"
It should pop-up a notification like the following (different themes may change the appearance a bit):
Do you have mate-notification-daemon installed? Check for that with the following command. I've shown my output as an example. Only mate-notification-daemon and mate-notification-daemon-common should be installed. If you've experimented with another desktop (you mentioned plasma), it's possible that you still have a different notification daemon installed instead of, or alongside, mate-notification-daemon, which will almost certainly create conflicts:
Thanks for this Dave and I tried entering that command but no notification popped up. I don’t know whether that’s because I am not technical though, and I didn’t know about the mate-notification-daemon. Thanks very much for sharing that, that sounds very promising! I will ask for someone technical for help following your suggestions
shouldn't there be a configurable parameter available from dconf-editor, for turning on/off the pop-up notifications for that application, similar to the below?
Does the Thunderbird calendar provide pop up notifications for events and tasks using MATE?
