Chris Murphy <lists <at> colorremedies.com> writes:
Restricting the context to just Fedora, by default it is a desktop OS with
a GUI. That's the default install
from live desktop, DVD ISO, and netinst media. That is the primary Fedora
deliverable and experience. It
is simply inappropriate for such a system, in the year 1999 let alone
2014, to silently produce
"important" messages via email as if the user will somehow just magically
discover them. And in fact,
that's not how it behaves, the user is properly informed of important
messages via alerts in gnome-shell
(and presumably on KDE), for things like SELinux alerts, crashes, and
degraded raid arrays (via udisks).
I'd really like to be able to get smartd notifications, in GNOME, without having to configure an MTA at all. For now, it's easier for me to just check gnome-disks regularly, but not as prompt. My last HDD only lasted about 1 1/2 years, and at the time its failure affected my ability to work, the number of bad sectors was high, but still below the FAIL threshold. (The previous day, there were no bad sectors at all, or any other sign of failure.) There wasn't enough time to do a backup before it failed. Having Fedora configured by default to give a desktop notification when the number of bad sectors increases (not just hitting an arbitrary FAIL threshold) would be handy.