Pinned to panel VMs

[appye]

Hi there.

Disclaimer: I am running Cinnamon 5.6.8 on vanilla Debian.

I recently upgraded to Debian 12 (Bookworm, latest stable) and am experiencing what I believe to be a regression related to VirtualBox and the Grouped window list in the panel ... Before the upgrade I was running Debian 11 (Bullseye), which has Cinnamon 4.8.6.

In Cinnamon 4.8.6 (and even the 3.x version before the grouped window list was included), I was able to create a shortcut to a virtual machine (using VirtualBox) that I would then pin to the panel. I can pin them to the panel in the new Cinnamon as well, but unlike with older versions, upon launching, this newer Cinnamon creates a new panel icon. It does not threat the pinned icon as an application, rather it treats it as a shortcut. Instead of being able to use the existing icon to minimize, activate and reactivate a running VM, similar to how the grouped window list acts with any regular app, I now have to interact with the new icon that is created upon launching the VM. I hope this makes sense?

I am pretty sure I have narrowed this down to Cinnamon itself. I have verified that this issue persists on a fresh install, so it is not related to leftover cruft and whatnot from the upgrade, and the version of Virtualbox is the same before and after the upgrade.

EDIT: Debian 11 is "BULLSEYE" ... not "Buster" ... I wish they didn't have three "Bs" in a row!

[spamegg]

There was a massive change / code rewrite in Cinnamon somewhere between those two versions (around when Mint 21 came out I think), where some features were dropped or changed, so the change might be intentional.

If you still suspect it's a bug, then report it here: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues
It might be helpful to include the full code of your shortcut file. Provide reproducible steps with details.

[appye]

Well, I don't know that it is a bug or a feature that was removed, but I certainly miss it! I will have to figure out how to script a workaround I suppose. I will try other window list applets as well. I remember using switching between Cobi window list and the current grouped window list for a while before it was included with Cinnamon by default. What was it called back then? Ice list or something?

I will wait a bit and then go ahead and report it.

[appye]

If it helps, I posted a bug report with a couple of videos attached:

https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/12066