Linux desktop image

• •

  The desktop looks like Orgo

  A new wallpaper and the Orgo mark on the Applications button, in place of a generic background and the stock Xfce mouse. The wallpaper is rendered at the resolution your desktop actually runs at rather than being stretched up to it.

• •

  Icons render again across the desktopFix

  Icons in the panel, the menu and the file manager could come up blank or as a generic placeholder. Fixed.

The largest image release so far: more than one screen on a single desktop, a much wider set of things an agent can do with the mouse and keyboard, GPU-accelerated desktops, and two fixes to the way a desktop checks credentials.

• •

  Terminals no longer go deaf after a credential rotationFix

  The browser terminal could stop accepting input while the desktop looked healthy. Fixed.

• •

  Stricter credential checksSecurity

  A desktop is stricter about what it will accept as a valid credential. Update your computers to pick this up.

• •

  More than one screen on a single desktop

  Create, list, resize and destroy screens through /screens, and point any action at one with ?screen=. Each screen is a separate display with its own pointer and its own window manager, so an agent working on the second screen cannot disturb the first. An unrecognised screen id is refused rather than quietly acting on the default one.

• •

  Region screenshots

  GET /screenshot?region=x,y,w,h returns one rectangle, captured at the display’s own resolution. Cropping it out of a full screenshot cost you the whole frame, and — if that frame was scaled on the way out — lost exactly the detail you were cropping for. The returned width and height describe the crop, not the screen.

• •

  The input primitives that were missing

  Clicks now take held modifiers and a repeat count, /mouse_down and /mouse_up let you act while the button is held for drag-select and canvas gestures, and /hold_key holds a key for a duration where /key only taps. The repeat count is applied inside the desktop, so a double- or triple-click no longer depends on how long each request took to arrive.

• •

  Ask an action to describe the screen it left behind

  Add ?context=1 to an action and the response also carries the pointer position, the focused window, and every window grouped by application with its geometry. It waits for the screen to settle before describing it, capped at 300 ms, so you are not handed a picture of the screen as it was before your click took effect. Without the parameter, responses are byte-for-byte what they were.

• •

  Read the page instead of guessing at coordinates

  With ?context=1, a focused Chrome window also reports the elements on the page in screen coordinates, so a click can name what it is aiming at rather than estimating a position off a screenshot. Native application windows keep their window-level description.

• •

  Scrollback in the browser terminal

  Terminals opened from the dashboard now keep their scrollback in your browser instead of asking the desktop to repaint the whole grid across the network on every scroll step. Templates that declare named terminal sessions are untouched and still run on tmux.

• •

  GPU-accelerated desktops on Intel Arc

  The image can now drive a passed-through Intel Arc GPU on a host that has one — hardware OpenGL and hardware video encoding, working from a cold boot with nothing to patch by hand afterwards. CPU-only desktops behave exactly as they did before.

• •

  A desktop that booted but never appearedFix

  A desktop could boot without its screen ever coming up. Fixed.

• •

  Disk usage, not just disk size

  A desktop now reports how much of its root filesystem is in use, so the dashboard can show space used against the total rather than only the size you provisioned.

• •

  Screenshots and shell commands no longer fail on a healthy-looking desktopFix

  Screenshots and shell commands could fail on a desktop that reported itself healthy. Fixed.

• •

  DNS works on every imageFix

  Some desktops came up unable to resolve names. Fixed.

• •

  The desktop repairs itself instead of going greyFix

  A desktop could drop to a grey screen and stay there. It now recovers on its own.

• •

  Lower-latency video

  Encoder tuning worth up to roughly 66–132 ms on the CPU-only hosts, which is where the delay was most noticeable. A stream can also be requested without the cursor drawn into it, so a client can render its own.

• •

  WebRTC streaming

  A desktop can encode an H.264 stream on demand for the WebRTC transport. Nothing runs until a stream is started, so an idle desktop spends nothing on it.

• •

  A separate disk for your files

  Some desktops are built with a second disk mounted at /home/orgo, kept apart from the system disk so the two can be sized independently. Whether a given computer has one depends on when and how it was created.

• •

  Running out of memory slows a desktop down instead of killing what is running

  Compressed swap, sized to the desktop’s own RAM. A workload that goes past its limit now swaps and gets slower, rather than having the kernel choose one of your processes and stop it.

Build tooling only. Nothing about the desktop changed.

The rest of this release was the separate Windows image build.