JackTulli/Linux-explorer v1.46.0

1.46.0: the fifth audit -- the bugs and the slow paths

on GitHub

The fifth audit of the whole desktop: two sweeps -- one for bugs in the shell and every built-in program, one for work done for nothing -- with every finding checked by three independent reviewers before anything was changed. 263 bug reports came in and 199 held up with all three reviewers; nearly all of them are fixed here, with most of the 18 that two of the three upheld. The few left are in the list at the end. Of the performance findings, the ones that measured out are in, each drawing the same pixels as before.

New

• Devuan and other sysvinit machines boot into Log On to Windows. install.sh --full only knew systemd and OpenRC, so on Devuan it said "start l2kdm from your init system" and the logon screen never came up. A respawn line in /etc/inittab now keeps it running (and brings it back, as systemd's Restart=always does), and the other display managers stand down through Debian's own /etc/X11/default-display-manager. uninstall.sh puts both back.
• The ReactOS pointers are the default, and the pointer theme GTK, Qt and Firefox use follows whatever set Mouse Properties has on.
• Media keys. Play, Pause and Stop now reach the player without playerctl (they sent a D-Bus signal no player answers), every key that carries a media symbol is listened for (a headset's or remote's Play did nothing), and a separate Pause key pauses.
• Mouse Properties' pointer speed and acceleration work on libinput -- every current Xorg's driver, which ignored them. None is libinput's flat profile, the others its adaptive one.

Fixed -- the worst of it

• The desktop could log you off by itself when standby or hibernate was set: an idle check left a stale error behind, and a program the shell had started exiting was then taken for a fatal one.
• Explorer: Add to Archive with "Delete files after adding" in a tar format deleted each file as it went, so Cancel or a full disk lost files that never reached the archive. Delete, Cut, Copy and Send To acted on at most 64 of the selected items. The Recycle Bin opened inside Explorer was always empty. Right-clicking empty space showed the menu of what was selected before.
• Wheel scrolling did nothing in lists with smooth scrolling on (the default): Control Panel's folders, Sounds, Fonts, Disk Management, Bluetooth.
• Device Manager disabled a device on any mouse press -- a wheel notch included -- without asking, and disabling works by driver, so every device on it went too. It asks now and names them. Its scroll bar ran to the end on one click.
• The composited scaler froze a window's picture after a resize or a minimise mid-draw.
• Taskbar auto-hide never came back after its first reveal, and slid away under its own Start menu.
• The logon screen's message box and Shut Down dialog took no keyboard at all; Alt+U/P/S/O now work too, and the session starts for the account PAM authenticated.
• The uninstaller, run from Windows Update's Remove button, stopped the logon screen first -- ending the session it ran in, and itself, with nothing removed.
• Notepad rewrote a Unix file with one CR in it as CR LF and made an old Mac file one line; Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V broke Undo; Go To did not scroll; opening a folder could make it quit. Its drop-down menus now hand over to each other as you move along the bar, and Left/Right go from menu to menu.
• Calculator's menus opened at the screen's top-left corner; MR, MS and M+ in mid-calculation, a second decimal point and results like "5e,-05" are right now.
• Mouse Properties: Browse... never took, Cancel kept the scheme you had only looked at, and Use Default resets just the pointer selected, as in Windows.
• Display Properties: rotated monitors, a monitor switched on beside the primary landing on top of it, settings saved when xrandr had refused them, and mouse buttons other than the left working the buttons.
• Disk Management: extended partitions drawn and deleted properly, whole-disk file systems protected like partitions, Initialize Disk refusing what Format and Delete refuse.
• Paint can be resized and maximised; Snipping Tool, Character Map, Imaging, Network Connections, Bluetooth, Proton Manager, Task Manager, Control Panel, Windows Update, the file dialog, the Start menu, the desktop and the window manager each have their share of the rest.
• At desktop scales above 100%, drop-down lists and menus opened away from where they belong.
• The installer: a light setup run again without --full deleted the logon screen its boot service still started; one program that would not build ended the whole install; the build ran without the install's prefix and compiled everything again as root.

Faster

• Folder Properties comes up at once on a big folder (it used to walk up to 200,000 files first, with Explorer frozen) and counts up as it goes, as Windows 2000 does.
• Long lines: a click in a 5,000-character line took 127 ms, now 0.04; word wrap and painting no longer scale with the whole line, and Notepad opens a 600 KB minified file.
• Paint: panning, gradients and shape tools on big pictures are 5-25 times quicker.
• Snipping Tool: the window-snip mode used 100 times less of the X server; copying a snip returns at once.
• Aero live glass and window drags send about half the X requests; Show Desktop focuses once instead of once per window.
• The scaler wakes 20 times a second when idle instead of 124, and draws the pointer sooner.
• The installer builds on every core: about 3 s here instead of 24.
• Windows Update's Flatpak check, Imaging's zoom and folder order, PNG decoding, picture resizing and Tab completion in the address bar are all quicker.

Not yet

• A machine without Tahoma opens the UI in Liberation Sans rather than the DejaVu Sans Condensed the font table means to fall back on -- fixing it changes how those machines look, so it waits for a decision.

• Void (runit) still needs the logon screen started by hand.

• Windows Update's checks still hold the window while the package manager answers; the folder windows' Address bar is still for show; Paint shows no sign that a picked colour is transparent; a program cannot close a file dialog it opened through the portal.

  curl -fsSL https://jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh