passive popups sent from VMs look weird

[adrelanos]

Currently if Debian [or Fedora] VMs dispatch passive popups... Examples:

• kdialog --passivepopup test
• notify-send test

These look weird.

Feature Request:
Integrate them with Qubes Manager. Show these popups like the usual starting vm-name alike popups as dispatched as usual by Qubes VM Manager.

Security Considerations:

• Would that be secure?
• If not, how else this could be designed to stay user friendly?

This is important for Qubes-Whonix usability. However, it looks like a general Qubes issue. Unspecific to Whonix.

---

Background:

At the Tor summer dev meeting, I discussed with @bnvk, that in future the only popups by Whonix should be the following.

• 1.: starting sys-whonix (dispatched as usual by Qubes VM Manager)
• 2.: sys-whonix started (dispatched as usual by Qubes VM Manager)
• 3.: Tor bootstrap in progress. (dispatched by sys-whonix whonixcheck)
• 4.: Tor bootstrap done. (dispatched by sys-whonix whonixcheck)

@bnvk, @mfc agreed, that those should use the same notification mechanism as Qubes uses.

[qubesuser]

Regarding Whonix in particular, it might be a good idea in general to only popup messages in case there is a problem, as opposed to the current behavior of having both whonixcheck and timesync popup dialogs unconditionally.

In the "normal" Whonix case it's not much of an issue, but with 10+ Whonix VMs it becomes annoying.

[marmarek]

This seems to be a duplicate of #889. There is even a prototype of such service.