Published . Development milestone: October 30, 2026.
Quieter mail and a Debian desktop trial.
October 30 brought fixes for accounts waiting on a locked keyring and Files without an archive helper, an unpublished prototype for quieter Mail, and early Debian desktop trials.
A desktop should distinguish between something that is broken and something that simply is not ready yet. October 30’s work applied that idea to saved account sign-ins, an optional Files helper and what closing Mail should mean.
The day also explored whether Ecliptic’s desktop could run on Debian. That work produced useful test results and exposed compatibility costs, but remained an experiment. By the day’s cutoff, it was not a decision to change Ecliptic’s Arch base or a new installer offered for download.
Waiting for your sign-in storage
Some background services can start before you log into the desktop, while the keyring that protects saved passwords and sign-ins is still locked. Previously, Online Accounts could mistake that for missing credentials and ask you to sign in again. A password lookup could also wait indefinitely for a prompt that had no screen to appear on.
The committed fix checks whether the keyring is available first. If it is locked and there is no desktop yet, the account request returns a temporary failure that apps can retry. It no longer treats that situation as proof that a saved sign-in has disappeared. Keyring commands also have time limits.
Regression tests use substitute keyring responses to cover waiting before login, a genuinely missing secret, a refused prompt and a lookup that does not answer. Those checks leave real accounts and passwords alone.
Files without an archive helper
An early desktop trial found that a missing optional tool could break an unrelated action. Without Xarchiver, Files’ archive helper, selecting an item raised an error while updating the available actions. Double-clicking a folder could select it without opening it.
Files now handles the missing helper and leaves archive actions unavailable. The new regression test simulates a double-click in an isolated display without application menu entries, checks that the folder opens and confirms that compression stays disabled. The development record also reports a successful virtual-mouse check on the test computer.
This fix was committed but had not been published as a Files package at the cutoff. The existing Ecliptic installation includes Xarchiver; the trial exposed a dependency assumption worth removing.
A quieter Mail prototype
Closing Mail can be a deliberate way to stop hearing about new messages. A development branch now ties its synchronization service to the open app rather than leaving it running indefinitely after the window closes. This was built and tested on the branch, but was not merged or published.
In that prototype, new-mail notifications stop when the last window goes away. A short grace period allows Mail to replace itself during an update. Work you already requested, such as sending or deleting a message, gets time to finish; a failed or unfinished send can still produce a notification so it is not silently forgotten.
Scheduled sending has a separate small program, woken by a timer only while a message is scheduled. It shares sending code and a lock with the main service to avoid duplicate sends. It does not keep the inbox synchronized. If saved credentials are unavailable because the keyring is closed, the message waits for Mail to open again and remains subject to the existing late-send checks.
The recorded branch test run had three skips and one failure in a new test’s timing. That test was corrected and passed 40 repeated runs, but the whole suite was not rerun afterward. A separate virtual-machine trial exercised the real timer and keyring. Provider sign-ins for the separate sender, the normal 30-minute late-send threshold and the channel update path still needed verification.
Trying another desktop foundation
The Debian work followed two distinct paths. A private trial based on Debian’s stable release, trixie, built a basic live image and offline installer using Debian’s signed boot components. Its recorded virtual-machine run passed all 13 checks, including Secure Boot, installation and rejection of tampered boot files. Twelve repeated USB boots also saved their reports successfully.
That result has limits: intermittent starts with a virtual USB 3 controller remained unexplained, and the final tests used USB 2. The trixie image had not been tried on the physical test computer by the cutoff.
A second trixie investigation rebuilt Hyprland and ran Ecliptic’s configuration and apps in isolated environments. It took 16 rebuilt source packages, a small patch and three packages from backports. Several apps needed temporary compatibility changes for older Python and desktop libraries. One Files Trash test still failed in the full suite, and password unlocking was not tested. This demonstrated a possible route, with maintenance and porting work still attached.
Separately, a test computer running Debian’s testing release, forky, reached an Ecliptic desktop with Secure Boot enabled. The bar, dock, desktop, Terminal, Files and AI window could run after dependency and library-path adjustments. Hands-on feedback confirmed several everyday controls, including the app grid, bar panels and AI panel; no AI model had been configured there. A real password login and the lock screen were still unverified at the cutoff.
Display switching also remained an active investigation. Early returns through a keyboard, video and mouse switch froze the test computer or gave it the wrong display mode. Three later returns were clean after an experimental graphics-driver setting, which is useful evidence rather than a proven general fix.
These results describe development through October 30. The Debian trials and quieter Mail branch were unpublished, and the compatibility work was not a finished migration. Ecliptic’s public release preparation continues separately.