I have recently checked almost all my GUI applications with xfce4-taskmanager to see how much CPU and RAM is consumed each (quite interesting on some items, like Java applications (much RAM) or dosbox (much CPU)).
I have noticed that there are some applications without a given name in xfce4-taskmanager. You can identify them by PID, at least. One time (it’s namely ventoy, so a 3rd-party application), I don’t even see this application at all.
Please, see screenshots for details. I marked the relevant parts in “red”.
I just mentioned ventoy, because it also shows this strange behaviour. Even more curious: the application isn’t shown at all in the taskmanager. I use the manual download and binary.
But what for the other items? They are by openSUSE repository management. And they occur, at least, but without a name?!
I use menulibre as shown above to manage my GUI menu and .desktop files. (It’s the third screenshot.)
But, please note: I used the xfce4-terminal to start applications, like by bleachbit & to explicitly get the PID. Then I could compare the PID delivered by the terminal with the one in the taskmanager.
bleachbit, dosbox and menulibre delivered a PID that I also found in the tasktmanager — but no corresponding name there! … And for ventoy I haven’t even found the PID. It wasn’t shown in my taskmanager.
Update:
For ventoy I found a “solution”: the application is started as root. But my taskmanager usually just shows users’ processes. I explicitly enabled “show processes by all users”… and ventoyis shown in my taskmanager now.
But the question still for the other three (bleachbit, dosbox, menulibre): I started them as user (bleachbit may be started as rootif wanted — but I did as user!) and they show PID but no name in taskmanager.
First I do not use Xfce, nor do I use this or a comparable application.
But it looks to me that it depends on what it should show as “name”. Definitely not the basename of the executable belonging to the PID because I see names there with spaces, etc.
Somewhere it says above “Namenloses Fenster” or Window without a name. That may point to the fact that they use the Windows name (that is what is shown in the top bar), which can of course only be done when there is a Window directly associated with the process. Can you check if that is the case for all your “missing names”.
Check in /usr/share/applications/ if there are .desktop files for the problem applications and if those .desktop files include a Name=xxx directive, like for instance:
bruno@LT-B:~> cat /usr/share/applications/btop.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=btop++
GenericName=System Monitor
GenericName[it]=Monitor di sistema
Comment=Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes
Comment[it]=Monitoraggio delle risorse: mostra utilizzo e statistiche per CPU, dischi, rete e processi
Icon=btop
Exec=btop
Terminal=true
Categories=System;Monitor;ConsoleOnly;
Keywords=system;process;task
bruno@LT-B:~>
All applications which doesn’t show names in xfce4-taskmanger, have a valid .desktop file with relevant name entries.
Using the same applications under KDE Plasma with systemmonitor instead of XFCE’s taskmanger, the application names show up properly. So it seems like an issue with xfce4-taskmanager.
