There are Linux apps out there whose installers come in the form of .sh installer files. In testing the latest Whonix OVA compared to my older one, I am noticing that I can no longer simply double-click on a properly formed .sh file that I mark as executable. Neither can Mousepad open it, it has a weird UTF-8 error.
Terminal runs it fine but that’s not the issue. GUI functionality has been taken away.
Was this deliberate? It’s taking away useful user convenience which in turn makes Whonix harder to use, making less people adopt it, which means our anonymity set is smaller.
Whonix should be becoming easier to use over time, not harder.
You can create a custom action from the Edit menu. I use “./%n” as the command in the ‘Basic’ tab. Select “text files” and “other files” in the ‘Appearance Conditions’ tab and you can right-click to execute. That should fix your problem.
BTW, didn’t mean to be so upset. Increasingly I see that upstream bugs are affecting Whonix. Sigh.
@81a989 Thanks for the tip. I still don’t like that such tweaking is required out of the box. It’s like we almost have to make post-Whonix installation scripts just to have Whonix easier to use by default. IMO, since Whonix is a standardized OVA, we could improve things by doing these fixes like my reporting here. We can control how awesome Whonix is!
Maybe I should get more involved in lobbying the Xfce developers also, but from what I’ve heard about DE developers in general, they tend to not listen to users, right? I think Xfce forums are friendly, but I’ve not tried them out much yet.
Anyway, I thought this change might be caused by Whonix team, as my two OVAs were only 15.x vs. another one, so it’s not Buster vs. Bullseye, or Xfce 4.12 vs. 4.14. Perhaps a quiet Xfce package change occurred?
No worries. Liked your post. (But please don’t over interpret forum likes.) It’s technically difficult to think in components. Therefore easy going.
That’s what Self Support First Policy for Whonix is trying to say. Try to reproduce issues outside of Whonix to remove 1 level of complexity. Test. See if a bug already exists. And if not, create one.
Indeed.
Weird indeed as such changes shouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t expect it outside an release upgrade which hasn’t happened yet.
Right, I have not thought of that. I’ll keep that in mind in future - a vanilla Debian VM of same stable release, and Xfce same version on it.
I have a feeling there may have been a quiet Thunar package update but I won’t look into this ‘bug’ further right now. If I do, I’ll first do it on a non-Whonix Xfce Debian 10.2 (etc), like I’ve just learned.
Increasingly I see that upstream bugs are affecting Whonix. Sigh.