I just did the usual apt-get update/dist-upgrade. I received no warnings of any kind, everything ran smoothly. After completion I now have two “Tor Browser (AnonDist)” icons on my desktop. One points to “/usr/share/applications/janondisttorbrowser.desktop”, the other points to “/usr/share/applications/anondist-torbrowser.desktop”.
This obviously worried me. However, they both execute the same command; “torbrowser %u”. The question, then, in my (admittedly inexperienced) mind, is this: Did the update change anything about the tor browser program, or have I just received a harmless but useless additional icon… I can’t find any logs of what was updated.
I’m entirely new to whonix and thought it was worth asking if I should be concerned about this. I’m considering shredding the vm and installing a fresh one.
Excuse my sparseness in answering this, but every minute explaining something as trivial as this is one minute missing for actual development. And there multiple of such questions almost every day so all of this adds up.
The duplicate shortcut was introduced while fixing a bug related to gnome-open, mimeopen and how poorly these tools handle mime priorities in some case: by the order of files in the file system.
On the other hand, I failed to remember that old versions will still have a desktop shortcut to the old .desktop file and that the whonix-ws-desktop-shortcuts package would therefore create a duplicate one.
Anyhow. It will be fixed in Whonix 13.
The bad news is:
If there was an actual issue as in a compromised / trojan horse / virus infected system, it is very much unlikely it would be possible to spot it in such an obvious way. See the following chapter on Malware for explanation why that is so: Computer Security Education - Whonix
The good news is:
After taking 15 minutes or so for explaining all of this in reasonable understandable English and finding out the references, there really was no need for concern at any point.