Let's resurrect the MOTD (Message Of The Day)!

[Qwinn1]

Hi everyone,

So at least one function that is default enabled in Linux Mint, fwdupdmgr, communicates to the user that a firmware update is available via setting the MOTD. As it stands, you will never see this until you log in via console or ssh. I think the majority of LM users can go months without doing either of those things. Plus, aside from fwupdmgr, it's sad to me as an old school sysdev that a system administrator can no longer really provide a system message to all users connecting via GUI. Basically, the Linux GUI has killed the MOTD.

Let's bring it back!

All you need is a file - I named mine "notifymotd.desktop" - to /etc/xdg/autostart:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=bash -c 'MOTD="$(cat /etc/motd)"; if [ "$MOTD" != "" ]; then notify-send "Message Of The Day" "$MOTD"; fi'
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
NoDisplay=false
Hidden=false
Name[en_US]=NotifyMOTD
Comment[en_US]=Notifies all users of the Message Of The Day, if any
X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=10

It works great! This will trigger a notification in the GUI with any message of the day in /etc/motd for all users 10 seconds after they log in, assuming /etc/motd isn't blank (which will be the default on a new install). It will show up in Startup Applications as "NotifyMOTD", and can be turned on and off per individual user.

I would submit a pull request myself, except for the translation issue. I suspect there's probably some automated tool that the LM devs have access to that can generate all the different language translations for a given application that we'd want to translate "Message Of The Day" and the Comment to. If you guys like the idea and there is no automated tool and each of those translations has to be set up manually with some Google Translate work, or there is such a tool that is publicly accessible and I can just run it, let me know what it is and I'll do the translation work either way myself and submit the PR.

Hope you guys like the idea. I searched around and for some odd reason it hasn't seemed to occur to anyone else? If this is a duplicate idea, sorry I missed it.