Sound/notification management with Lollipop upgrade

[lebatte]

I recently upgraded to Lollipop on Samsung Galaxy S5. I'm super confused regarding the new way sounds, vibration, muting, and notifications are handled in Lollipop. As a general request, does anyone know of a good guide to get me up to speed?

To me, it seems like I simply cannot get things the way I want them anymore. For instance, I just found out that to get LED notifications, I have to have vibration or sound turned on. No LED notifications on mute/silent? Are they serious? There seems to be no way to get a notification now without having my phone vibrating or making noise on my desk at work, which means I'm either annoying my coworkers or not getting notifications. It seemed that if I want to disable vibration and still get LED alerts, I need to go into every app and disable it there, which is totally counterintuitive—I used to be able to control this by pressing the volume button on the side of the phone.

Not only that, but I currently have vibration turned on so that I can get LED alerts, and I unchecked vibration in Hangouts for both Hangouts messages and SMS messages, and it's still vibrating.

Is there any way at all to get LED notifications without vibration?

I don't even know where to start on the "interruptions" system. It's so convoluted. Who is it helping that you can turn your alarms off buy just turning your volume down? I feel like it's only a matter of time before I wake up late for work because of that.

If I'm complaining for no reason and there are workarounds, please let me know. Thanks!

 

[Snapphane]

I'm new to this myself, but this is how things work if I understand it correctly.

You can filter your notifications with "Priority" and you can control volume and vibration. Sadly though, there is no "sound less" option.

If you pick "all", you get notification for everything. "Priority" gets you your priority notifications and "none" gives you nothing. Once you picked an option you can choice if you want sound or vibration. But that's about it.

The rumor is that "sound less" will be an option in Android 5.1, but for now I think you will have to do with vibrate. Or kill notifications entirely with "Priority" or "None".