Any advantages to this over scp, samba/nfs, or even something like LocalSend?

Oh very neat, that works great! A much better solution.

Good call on DBUS. Setting XDG_RUNTIME_DIR seems to be enough to fix it up, I’ll update my other response.

I know you’re looking for a desktop solution, but here’s something that you can try in case you can’t find one – I’m betting that having a solution is better than having none!

So I just had a quick muck around:

• You can use pgrep to detect if a process with a given name is running
• You can write to /dev/pts/0 to trigger a desktop notification
• You can drop it into a cron job to run it automatically on a schedule

As a test, the following command will look for a process called syncthing and send a desktop notification if it can’t find it:

pgrep syncthing || echo "Syncthing is not running > /dev/pts/0"

To set up a cron job:

1. open a terminal
2. open the editor with crontab -e (if you need to pick an editor, nano will probably be your best bet, it’s easiest to use)
3. in the editor, add the following line to the end of the file: 0 * * * * pgrep syncthing || echo "Syncthing is not running" > /dev/pts/0
   • The 0 * * * * sets up the schedule (on the 0th minute of every hour, every day of the month, every month, on every day of the week)
   • Everything after that is the command to run
4. save and quit

If you ever want to get rid of it, just open the cron file again (crontab -e) and remove the line.

I gave this a go on KDE under Wayland and it seems to do the trick. Good luck, I hope you find what you’re looking for!

[edit-1] added step (2) to install libnotify-bin in case you don’t have it already. [edit-2] added XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to step (4) [edit-3] removed references to libnotify, replace with /dev/pts/0 (Nice one, @sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works !)

Hello! I don’t know of a desktop watchdog application that will do this for you, but you may be able to achieve this with a simple cron job. Probably just an hourly crontab entry that looks for a running process with the right name, and uses something like notify-send to send an alert if it’s not found. I’ll jump on the computer and have a quick play, though I run gnome not plasma so I don’t know how well it will translate.

This photo confused my brain, which initially thought it was a green screen wall with trees projected onto the upper half as if looking through a VR headset.

Maybe I need to go and touch some grass.