Sysmaint and its removal broken

[HulaHoop]

I postponed the upgrade to Whonix/KS 18 until very recently, to minimize the potential disruption to my workflow in case something was amiss. While an overall great version with many major milestones, I ran into some bugs:

• When selecting sysmaint persistent mode, the system only shows a blank desktop wallpaper with absolutely no taskbar or icons. The taskbar only appeared when triggering a restart from the VMM menu. The system maint control panel only appeared intermittently and rarely. I managed to enter the root shell when using the keyboard shortcuts for it, but we can’t expect new users to know this.

• Attempting to boot into sysmaint persistent mode doesn’t work unless the system boots in graphics UI mode. Any attempt to do so in command line mode is ignored - as when attempted on Whonix Gateway when configured with lower RAM

• sysmaint mode causes the mouse to be captured vs regular user mode instead of the seamless cursor experience. Easy to deal with, but the mouse becomes harder to move accurately in this case, moving larger distances with the normal touch input. Not always reproducible

• The “remove sysmaint-user boundary” boot option similarly boots into a dysfunctional desktop that has a blank wallpaper. No safe uninstall method as documented on the wiki is ever initiated

[Patrick]

@HulaHoop

Attempting to boot into sysmaint persistent mode doesn’t work unless the system boots in graphics UI mode. Any attempt to do so in command line mode is ignored

What do you mean by “attempt to do so in command line mode”?

Virtual Consoles? Should be fully functional.

@HulaHoop

sysmaint mode causes the mouse to be captured vs regular user mode instead of the seamless cursor experience.

Probably KVM version specific bug.

The systemd unit that is responsible for mouse integration (spice-vdagentd) isn’t starting?

This might fix it. Please investigate, confirm.

`Wants=spice-vdagentd.socket`

@HulaHoop

The “remove sysmaint-user boundary” boot option similarly boots into a dysfunctional desktop that has a blank wallpaper.

Due to missing spice-vdagentd also screen adjustment is broken? And the popup you’re supposed to see which shows the confirmation dialog isn’t in the visible area of the screen and would require scrolling left/right/up/down?

@HulaHoop

No safe uninstall method as documented on the wiki is ever initiated

Quote Uninstalling user-sysmaint-split and Enabling Unrestricted Admin Mode:

Alternatively, you can use dummy-dependency to remove the user-sysmaint-split package while booted in PERSISTENT Mode | SYSMAINT Session | system maintenance tasks (a special startup mode used for system changes). [1]

sudo dummy-dependency --purge --yes user-sysmaint-split