notifd

A small notification daemon for Linux desktops, written in Rust. It owns the D-Bus name org.freedesktop.Notifications, implements the Desktop Notifications Specification (plus sound, a real DND Inhibited property and persistence), and exposes a typed D-Bus interface for a separate UI process.

It is designed to pair with a UI-only shell (this one is used with Quickshell). Any D-Bus client can consume the UI interface; the standard notification API remains unchanged.

Why split the daemon from the UI?

Most shells embed their notification server. Separating the backend from the presentation gives you:

• One source of truth for Do Not Disturb. notifd exposes the standard Inhibited property, so applications that honour it — Telegram Desktop among them — stop playing their own notification sound while DND is active.
• A single, refined default sound. Apps that ask for the default get the configured system sound; apps that bring their own sound-file / sound-name keep their own.
• A UI that survives reloads. Notifications live in the daemon, so reloading the shell no longer drops them.

Features

• Full org.freedesktop.Notifications implementation: Notify, CloseNotification, GetCapabilities, GetServerInformation and the NotificationClosed / ActionInvoked / NotificationReplied signals.
• Inhibited property and Inhibit / UnInhibit methods.
• Sound policy: honours sound-file, sound-name and suppress-sound; falls back to a configurable standard sound; silent under DND. Playback goes through libcanberra (media.role=event) with a paplay fallback.
• image-data / image-path decoding into cached PNGs.
• replaces_id, expire_timeout and persistence (resident) handling.
• DND state persisted across restarts.
• org.gofroshka.Notifd1: typed snapshot, change signal and UI actions on the same session bus as the notification API.
• Ready for systemd (Type=dbus).

Architecture

app ──D-Bus org.freedesktop.Notifications──► notifd ◄──D-Bus org.gofroshka.Notifd1──► UI (Quickshell)

The daemon owns the standard name org.freedesktop.Notifications; the UI queries its private interface and subscribes to changes over D-Bus.

Building

With Cargo:

cargo build --release

Or with Nix:

nix build

For development, the repo ships a flake dev shell wired up for direnv. After direnv allow the shell (cargo, rust-analyzer, libcanberra, pulseaudio) loads automatically.

Running

NOTIFD_STANDARD_SOUND=/path/to/default.wav notifd

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables, so the systemd unit stays declarative:

Variable	Default	Meaning
NOTIFD_STANDARD_SOUND	message-new-instant	Default sound (XDG sound name or absolute file path). Empty string disables the fallback.

DND state is stored in $XDG_STATE_HOME/notifd/dnd and restored on start.

UI D-Bus interface

Service org.freedesktop.Notifications, object /org/gofroshka/Notifd, interface org.gofroshka.Notifd1:

• GetSnapshot() → (b, a(ussssssbba(ss))): the DND flag and notifications. Each notification contains id, app name, app icon, summary, body, urgency (low/normal/critical), image path (empty if absent), inline-reply flag, resident flag and (action id, label) pairs. Fetch this on startup and after change signals; the snapshot is atomic and also recovers missed events.
• Changed(kind: s, id: u): emitted after a state change. kind is added, updated, removed or dnd; id is 0 for DND changes. Clients should refetch the snapshot rather than relying on event payloads.
• SetDnd(b), Dismiss(u), Invoke(u, s), Reply(u, s), Clear(): actions from the UI. Dismiss/clear keep their user-dismissed NotificationClosed reason on the standard interface.

For example:

busctl --user call org.freedesktop.Notifications /org/gofroshka/Notifd \
  org.gofroshka.Notifd1 GetSnapshot
busctl --user call org.freedesktop.Notifications /org/gofroshka/Notifd \
  org.gofroshka.Notifd1 SetDnd b true

systemd

[Unit]
Description=Notification daemon
After=graphical-session.target
PartOf=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=dbus
BusName=org.freedesktop.Notifications
ExecStart=%h/.nix-profile/bin/notifd
Environment=NOTIFD_STANDARD_SOUND=/path/to/default.wav
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical-session.target

Type=dbus makes systemd consider the unit started only once org.freedesktop.Notifications is claimed, which lets a UI unit order itself after it with After=notifd.service.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.