choosing "End Application" on a nautilus window kills the Desktop

[Lightbreeze]

Binary package hint: nautilus

if a nautilus window is not responding, and you choose to close it, a helpful dialog will ask whether you want to 'Wait' or 'End Application'.
I expect for the nautilus window to disappear;
instead choosing to end will kill the nautilus window but will also kill your Desktop - showing no icons, no right click menu.

Jaunty 9.04 with updates

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, but what would you expect? that's the right behavior, is you read the description of the nautilus package: "Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. It allows
 to browse directories, preview files and launch applications associated
 with them. It is also responsible for handling the icons on the GNOME
 desktop. It works on local and remote filesystems."

which means that he's also the responsible for drawing the desktop (right click menu there as well) if you kill the application well there's no nautilus until you open it again, going to Places-> Home Folder for example.

[Lightbreeze (nedhoy-gmail)]

Ubuntu offers the user the chance to close a non-responsive application:
from a users perspective the application is the window they are looking at -
not the desktop. I don't know how easy this would be to fix, and you
obviously don't think it is a problem, but to my eyes killing the Desktop is
not a correct solution to the situation.

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Pedro Villavicencio <email address hidden>wrote:

> Thanks for the report, but what would you expect? that's the right
> behavior, is you read the description of the nautilus package: "Nautilus is
> the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. It allows
> to browse directories, preview files and launch applications associated
> with them. It is also responsible for handling the icons on the GNOME
> desktop. It works on local and remote filesystems."
>
> which means that he's also the responsible for drawing the desktop
> (right click menu there as well) if you kill the application well
> there's no nautilus until you open it again, going to Places-> Home
> Folder for example.
>
> ** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided => Low
>
> ** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> ** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Ubuntu Desktop Bugs (desktop-bugs)
>
> --
> choosing "End Application" on a nautilus window kills the Desktop
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/371668
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “nautilus” source package in Ubuntu: Incomplete
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: nautilus
>
> if a nautilus window is not responding, and you choose to close it, a
> helpful dialog will ask whether you want to 'Wait' or 'End Application'.
> I expect for the nautilus window to disappear;
> instead choosing to end will kill the nautilus window but will also kill
> your Desktop - showing no icons, no right click menu.
>
> Jaunty 9.04 with updates
>

[A. Walton (awalton)]

This is no different than closing Explorer on Windows or Finder on OS X or Konqueror in KDE: when you close the application that's running the desktop, goodbye desktop. The only way we could circumvent that is to run a separate process for the desktop window, which is just a waste of a couple of megs of RAM (and not only from our viewpoint, but from every implementor of the exact same technology's viewpoint as well).

Instead, you should provide us on information as to why the window went unresponsive, and see if it's something we can fix. E.g. Nautilus can "freeze" if it or one of its plugins does synchronous I/O on a file, especially if that file is hosted on a remote file system and we've tried to eliminate all synchronous I/O for exactly that reason. Debug information like the output from an strace of when it freezes is helpful.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the behaviour described there is not a bug, the desktop is the same process running that the one displaying the other directories