Created attachment 5192 Screenshot of issue (top right corner)
The pop-up notifications that are triggered when changing the volume and brightness levels using keyboard shortcuts and mouse scroll over the indicator icons are broken. Instead of opening a pop-up with a volume/brightness icon and a bar displaying the current level, it opens up a small blank notification pop-up. I have a clean install of Xubuntu 13.04 that was immediately updated to 13.10. I remember the notification pop-up working correctly in my xfce install over ubuntu 13.04. Because of how immediately I upgraded to saucy, I do not remember if it worked before the upgrade. I have downgraded xfce4-notifyd to 2.3 and the problem persisted.
Can you still reproduce this issue with Xubuntu? I know it's a long time later, but I was using Xubuntu even at the time you submitted your bugreport and I've never seen a problem like that. What are you using to trigger volume changes? (xfce4-volumed? < that would be the standard in Xubuntu)
*** Bug 5806 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I started experiencing this issue about one week ago after a general packages update with my Debian 8 x64 install running kernel 3.16.0-4 and XFCE 4.12 on a Lenovo G480 laptop with kernel command "acpi_osi=linux" for video and FnKey compatibility. Packages upgrade involved updates to acpi, laptop_mode and kernel image to 3.16.7-ckt20. After I updated and rebooted, notifications still behaved normally - for a moment. Given a random time into the session, anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, all notifications lost their bars and icons, becoming text-only. Even invoking notify-send -i /path/to/icon "Message" would produce an icon-less notification. Perhaps more importantly, even before the notifications become iconless, the notification that appears for brightness control *never* shows correctly. It appears blank just as in the head attachment for this thread. pkill'ing the xfce4-notifyd binary and restarting it (via nohup or ALT-F2) resets the situation: it makes the icons and bar appear once again -except for brightness control- but the notification system lasts only 15 or so minutes before it starts presenting the issue again. I made the attempt to start a console and run the notification daemon on the foreground to see if any errors appeared: pkill xfce4-notifyd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd > notifyd-errors.txt After about 15 minutes in, the binary dies mysteriously, without throwing any error lines, and the file appears empty, which makes me suspect that something is stopping the notification system "normally" (ie.: not a sigkill, not a terminate) and it is then started automatically and somehow incorrectly the next time a notification is sent. Hibernating the laptop also resets the problem, with the same symptoms described as above. Between the system upgrade and the particulars of the brightness notification always presenting the issue, I'm given to initially suspect something related to laptop_mode or overall power management at the XFCE session level might be the culprit, but I haven't been able to collect further evidence into this case.
Very odd issue I have to say. To me it seems though as if what LAMB describes would be some external service killing notifyd. Would be great if anybody else could reproduce this or describe clear steps to do so.
The notification daemon now does not exit anymore after 10mins of inactivity, so I presume this problem should not appear anymore after this commit: https://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-notifyd/commit/?id=d87a4a93b2ec4ab094f5a35ae818395f750f2891 Feel free to reopen if you can still reproduce this issue!