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Re: What is tumbler, and do I need it?

On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 12:08:59PM -0700, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I just tried displaying a JPEG file with ristretto.  Rather than popping
up right away, there was a delay of 30 seconds or so before the image
finally appeared.  Running ps, I found a process called tumblerd, which
appeared to be consuming system resources.  A bit of web searching
revealed that other people have had trouble with this too.

Looking for a description of tumbler, I found the following:
"Tumbler is a D-Bus service for applications to request thumbnails
for various URI schemes and MIME types."  OK, my eyes are glazed
over now.  In practical terms, what does this mean?  Is it anything
to do with the thumbnails I see in thunar?  Or is it something
unrelated - and should I care?


D-Bus is a messaging bus. Basically, it allows applications to talk to
each other in an asynchronous and relatively standardised manner. So, an
application can sort of call out "I need someone to generate a thumbnail
of this JPEG" and some _other_ application can be listening for that
message, take the job and then reply back some time later. In theory,
that thumbnailing task can be performed by any of a number of
applications, so long as they register with D-Bus in the same way (in
practice, a user would usually only have one tool registered for each
task). D-Bus mediates all sorts of messages from thumbnails to
wallpaper, to power settings, to user information, etc etc.

So, yes, in short. "Tumbler" is generating the thumbnails on behalf of
Thunar. 

When I ask to see a picture, I don't want my machine running off
and doing God knows what behind my back.  I'll leave that kind of
behaviour to Windows vict^H^H^H^Husers.

Is there any reason I shouldn't remove or disable this package?


You'll lose functionality (Ristretto displays a strip of thumbnails of
other images in the current directory. Without it, you'll struggle
navigating around the current directory), but other than that no.

However, it may also be worth noting that Tumbler *should* cache the
thumbnails it generates. If you've never opened a particular folder in
Thunar/Ristretto, thumbnailing may take some appreciable time. But once
the thumbnails are generated, they should only take a matter of seconds
to reload (so it might be worth persisting with it a while).

--
For more information, please reread.

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