Automatic "Do not disturb" notifications inhibition to protect privacy when presenting or for some types of screen sharing

An idea came to my mind, and I think it hasn’t already been implemented (or at least, I never heard of that being the case): automatically enabling DnD mode to hide/inhibit non-urgent (non-system) notifications while doing presentations to other people. For example, you wouldn’t want to have email or chat notifications showing up on the screen while you are doing a presentation in front of a live audience (with LibreOffice Impress, or Evince, and maybe video players) or through a videoconferencing screen share. Those could reveal confidential or embarrassing information, in addition to being distracting.

Ideally the apps should be able to request this kind of temporary inhibition from GNOME’s notifications system while they are doing something in particular (fullscreen on external monitor and/or streaming to a screensharing portal).

Potential caveats I can imagine:

  • You want to be notified if your battery is reaching critical levels, or network has been lost, etc. so there would need to be a distinction between important/system notifications, and normal notifications.
  • How to handle the case where you are presenting to a live audience and exit the slideshow or video, either temporarily or because the presentation is finished, but the screen is still shown to the audience?
  • Users might need the ability to disable this privacy feature for cases where they want to demo notifications or something like that.
  • Screen sharing in the case of remote desktop (ex: RDP with gnome-remote-desktop) would probably need notification turned on, because this type of screensharing is typically either a tech support usecase or yourself using your own computer.

Is this a good idea? If so, here are some questions:

  • Do we already have the necessary puzzle pieces for this from the GNOME side? Which technologies would need to be used by applications?
  • Where do we file bug reports, if anywhere else than individual applications (like LibreOffice Impress, Evince’s presentation mode, web browsers and other videoconferencing apps, and maybe OBS Studio & other screen recorders)? i.e. is this gnome control center, gnome settings daemon, something else?

If others think this is a good idea, and that it is realistically achievable, maybe we could make this some sort of global initiative in the spirit of the old safety & privacy BoF from GUADEC 2014.

IIRC this is already the case on Plasma

Fullscreen already prevents non-critical notifications.

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