GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 676998
Incoming call's ringtone doesn't play if the sound theme is muted in GNOME's sound preferences
Last modified: 2018-05-22 15:33:36 UTC
If the volume is set to zero/muted in gnome-control-center's sound preferences in the "Sound effects" tab, Empathy will not play the ringing sound when there's an incoming call. Given that a call is probably considered an urgent event, perhaps the mute property should be ignored (unless the user is "Busy")... if Empathy has control over such a thing.
*** Bug 600745 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
See also: bug #666221
Agreed.
(In reply to comment #0) > Given that a call is probably considered an urgent event, perhaps the mute > property should be ignored (unless the user is "Busy")... if Empathy has > control over such a thing. Please, no. The only sound I ever want coming out of a PC, tablet, or phone is music or from a video I explicitly started myself. I find alert sounds aggravating in general, but if one of my devices suddenly made a lot of noise without warning and, say, I'm in a location where I would be personally embarrassed for causing a disturbance (like a library), I would be very upset. Turning off alert sounds is one of the first things I do with almost any device, and that choice really needs to be respected. Phones have the benefit of vibration for incoming calls (and taking over the full screen) which we don't, unfortunately. I think there are two important cases here: 1) I'm doing high-attention-requiring tasks and don't want to be disturbed (and there's a non-trivial risk of me being interrupted by an incoming call) 2) I'm doing low attention-requiring tasks (and/or there's a trivial risk of me being interrupted by an incoming call) In the case of 1), I think we would rather quietly decline incoming calls and add a notification to the message tray (for the next time the user re-enables notifications) or mouses over it) For 2), we should have an incoming call notification and play a ringing sound (unless alert sounds are muted) The difficulty would be effectively communicating /how/ a user could affect these changes (by flipping the Notifications toggle in the user menu) and /that/ a user has already affected this behavior by flipping the toggle. If we had to pick a compromise to handle both these cases without making the user choose (especially without them understanding they've made this choice), I would follow the behavior for case 2) and use a critical notification (as in bug 666221 comment 4). I think even very busy people would rather have to decline the occasional incoming call than miss calls (some of which are surely important). In the extreme case that someone doesn't want to have incoming calls, they can disable the necessary account(s). After all, they don't really want to use them if they don't want incoming activity.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/empathy/issues/550.