The default GNOME notification area is slap-bang centre top of the screen, a position that makes it hard to miss notifications and alerts.
But sometimes, with too many notifications, it can also make it hard to work, especially with maximised windows.
So, if you want to move the GNOME notification area, you can — all you need is a simple extensions.
GNOME notifications used to appear in the lower right-hand corner of the desktop. While this was a less intrusive position it did mean notifications were easily overlooked.
In 2015 GNOME developers moved the GNOME notification area to the top of the screen as part of wider tweaking and tuning of the desktop.
I find this position ideal, and because notifications are dismissible (unlike Unity) if they happen to get in the way I can quickly punt them away.
But I rarely run apps maximised.
There are no GNOME notification settings visible in GNOME Shell out of the box — but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Note: the following add-on lets you change where notifications appear. If you want to disable GNOME notifications entirely you’ll need to use a different extension.
Meet the ‘Panel OSD’ GNOME Extension
GNOME is regularly criticised for not offering enough settings — but it does, it’s just that most are not surfaced to users. Developers can take full advantage of GNOME’s flexibility by building GNOME extensions.
But if you want to move the position of GNOME Notifications you can do.
The Panel OSD GNOME extension say it lets you “configure where on the (main) screen notifications will appear”.
In short, that means you can use the extension to reposition notifications anywhere on your screen.
First, install the Panel OSD extension from the GNOME Extensions website:
Once installed, open Panel OSD in the GNOME extensions preferences app.
Move the ‘Horizontal Position’ and ‘Vertical Position’ sliders to adjust where notifications appear, and hit the ‘show test notification’ to check everything looks correctly.
If, for example, you want your notifications to show in the same place as they do on the Unity desktop, you’d set the horizontal slider to around 95%, and the vertical slider to around 95% too,
via inflo.ws