Since a Manjaro update two or three months ago (XFCE stable) the notifications remain on the desktop when I unmount or ‘safely remove’ any USB storage, although the setting in “Notifications” is to fade after 10 seconds (before that update these did fade away.) Other notifications still do fade out as expected.
And the behaviour is the same even on a completely fresh installation or if booting the life media. (On the same hardware, though.)
To remove each of those notifications I have to click on them.
The setting to adjust the fade-out time ‘as requested by the application’ is on.
Notification logging is not active.
This may be a minor discomfort, but I was used to wait for the notifications to disappear before removing a USB media - as I had observed them to stay longer, if some bigger data portions were still due to be written out (as visible if the USB media has an activity indicator LED). Now there’s only a small animation in Thunar’s shortcuts list, but I’m not sure how reliable that shows the writing activity, before I may safely remove the USB media; the desktop notification can be closed immediately, even if the animation is still running - sometimes I observed the text changing from ‘wait…’ to ‘safe…’, but not always.
Of course, I may issue some ‘sync’, ‘sudo sync’ and finally ‘sudo blockdev --flushbufs /dev/sdX1 /dev/sdX’ before removing the media (and I learned already that it’s safer to ‘dd’ an .iso file to USB with ‘oflag=nocache’), but all this is not really convenient and prone to typing errors - especially, if every time I have to determine first which letter I’m dealing with …
If anyone could advise a fix or helping hint, I’d really appreciate it.
under your linked article you replied to this question:
It is.
Please, make this a little clearer to me and excuse my lack in native English:
Did you mean to say: syncisnot enough - or - syncis enough? (… to have the data written safely to the storage…)
I started reading through all the linked articles, but I don’t feel experienced enough to start trying different cache handling parameters. If I’d just have to issue another sync manually, I’d be quite happy already. I’ll read further on yet.
(And I have only 4GB RAM, the 16GB-issue will hardly affect me in near future.)
Remains the question of the desktop messages which I have to remove also manually - each - as these don’t wish to fade out. Remove the setting for ‘timeout as requested by application’?
I’ll just add my understanding, sync is definitelly enough but you have to do it manually. Disabling write cache kind of automates this so you don’t have to think about it and that’s the whole point about it. That has good and bad points as I’d rather control these things manually, then do sync every time even if that’s not what I want.
As far as i understand sync forces the cache to write. It will write eventually, but the point was, it can be a slow process under circumstances, so one might want to disable cache altogether so there is nothing ro write and the unmounting would be instantaneous.
Btw. @linux-aarhus updated his AUR package with udev rule for the new kernels above 6.1.
This was the (certainly more important) point - to make sure that the cache was written out.
My other question remains:
Other XFCE notifications do fade out, those from Thunar about unmounted or safely removed file systems / storage devices stay solid until I click on them.
I think it is an unwanted feature/bug, some developer somewhere set this to be a critical level notification, but for a simple click i have not bothered testing.
You can play with the Notifications-Applications panel, i suspect it is either xfce4-notifyd or org.xfce.thunar and probably the “critical” toggle, but i don’t know if anything else will disappear that way. You can try an tell us.
p.s. once again a reminder - the notification is unfortunately not directly related to the unmoun process, for realtime action look at the sidebar of thunar after clicking unmount. And if it cannot unmount there is another, completely different notification.
On the applications-panel under settings - notifications I have three toggles for org.xfce.Thunar for mute, enable urgent notifications and enable logging. But I can change only the first setting, i.e. completely disable Thunar’s notifications or leave them enabled. It seems to be burried somewhat deeper… Thus I’ll probably have to live with moving the mouse cursor frequently to close the notifications (since I very often attach and remove USB media); I rather prefer detailed information over no information.
In fact the notification text updates from - don’t remove, writing data (similiar) - to - filesystem unmounted (or media can be removed safely - respectively).
One puzzling detail may be, that, if I have a USB SSD attached during boot, Thunar does not show the option for safe removal, but only for unmounting. If this same USB SSD is attached after boot, that option is there. This happens only with “disks”, not with “pendrives”.
During the recent few days I noticed that my Thunar notifications for unmounting file systems or removing storage devices fade again as the did formerly. There were several bigger updates during last week - I did not check in detail which packages were in those long lists, but apparently the behaviour of not fading notifications was fixed. Thanks to the developer!