Xfce Forum

darenw

Member

Registered: 2020-06-06

Posts: 3

Strange Thunar bug, flipping workspaces

Yesterday when using Thunar I experienced a strange phenomenon.  Whenever I moved a file from one folder to another, or deleted a file, the virtual desktop, or workspace, or whatever it's called these days, flipped to the first one. I was working on a project in the 10th workspace.  I have a total of about 20 workspaces to keep different workflows and projects and temporary activities separate.  Each time I dragged an image file, poof! back on workspace #1.  This was repeatable, deterministic, but only for yesterday.  I have never seen  this problem before.

My windows manager is icewm.  I don't use KDE or Gnome or any other big desktop system. Just icewm, thunar, several other XFCE things, and the occasional application meant to work in KDE or Gnome, but all I have are the foundational libraries which always get along fine. (So I like to believe.) My distro is Arch. 

I was going to try to report this as a bug, but due to a power outage, I had to shut down and reboot. Might as well upgrade.  Thunar wasn't changed since previous upgrade, which was about a week ago due to another power outage.  In any case, Thunar acts normal now.  BTW, rural Montana does not have great reliable power availability, though internet is fantastic, like in a big college town.

Aside from this one-time glitch, Thunar has been great.  Sometimes it crashes, typically on folder full of images, when moving or deleting images. Sometimes, just looking at the thumbnails.  I do a lot of photography, image processing, video analysis, and 3D animation, so I am routinely dealing with thousands of images in a folder.  Upon restarting it, thunar usually doesn't crash the second time I do the same action.  If it does, the third time is fine.  I don't think there's any relation between this crashing and the weird workspace flipping I had yesterday, but maybe there is.

Bottom line: Thunar acts strange, but at this time I can't reproduce the problem.  Good luck, anyone who would like to debug this!

eriefisher

Member

From: ON, Canada

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 531

Re: Strange Thunar bug, flipping workspaces

Just a guess here. Since your dealing with a metric tonne of images/videos I'm going to blame it on thumb nailing. Normally XFCE uses tumbler and I have found it a bit unsteady sometimes, although recently it's been solid. What is your system using for thumbnailing? It's possible it's not keeping up with the sheer volume it's dealt and then also being manipulated/deleted at the same time.

Again, just a guess.

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MountainDewManiac

Member

From: Where Mr. Bankruptcy is Prez

Registered: 2013-03-24

Posts: 1,115

Re: Strange Thunar bug, flipping workspaces

At the time of the issue, was your computer low on free (available) memory?

Does the window manager manage the workspaces? If so, revert the updated files to the versions installed when the issue presented itself and switch to xfwm. If, after doing so, you are unable to reproduce the issue, I would suspect icewm. If issue is still present, revert to icewm and update files one by one, attempting after each update to reproduce issue. When your computer attains a state where you are unable to reproduce the issue, strongly suspect the last file updated (or its older version, I mean).

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Mountain Dew Maniac

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darenw

Member

Registered: 2020-06-06

Posts: 3

Re: Strange Thunar bug, flipping workspaces

I have 32GB RAM, and it is rarely fully used. Often it's 20G to 28G used. When I see more than that (using Conky) I close some browser tabs or whatever, to avoid the slowness of swap (also 32GB). 

It probably is something to do with thumbnails. When I open an image file heavy folder, and right away click on a sub-folder, and scroll down quick, and open an image, generally navigating around and renaming or moving or opening files at a quick pace, crashes seem more likely.   

Maybe related or not, when I unload my camera into a new folder, thumbnails appear, but many are for photos I took four years ago.  When I open a new image it looks fine, but the thumbnail is old.   Images have names like DSC01234.JPG, and it's only the final four digits that count up.  My camera's "odometer" has rolled over four or five (or six) times since I started saving images years ago.  Poor little thumb-maker gets confused!