The issue also happens when a box doesn't have a thumbnail, we can't know if it's running or not in such cases.

similarly, you could also say it's hard to differentiate a local VM and a remote display. For those cases, we don't really have a way to know if the VM is running, or taking screenshots may not be possible (although we could improve this situation a little)

It doesn't help that all my VMs only show black lock screen so *all* thumbnails look the same...

The last patch in bug 678455 helps a bit on dark screens.

I would recommend some sort of icon overlayed on top of machines indicating the state of the machine.

Created attachment 243650 [details] [review]
machine: Property to indicate under construction status

Currently this is only true for libvirt machines that are under
installation.

Created attachment 243651 [details] [review]
machine: Indicate to user if machine is shutdown

This is useful for differentiating between shutoff machines and machines
that are simply showing all/mostly black screen (think idle
screen/screensaver).

Created attachment 243652 [details] [review]
machine: Indicate to user if machine is shutdown

This is useful for differentiating between shutoff machines and machines
that are simply showing all/mostly black screen (think idle
screen/screensaver).

Review of attachment 243652 [details] [review]:

I don't understand why machines under construction are special cased here?

Review of attachment 243652 [details] [review]:

Because Boxes is responsible for its state. When machine shutsdown, its actually a reboot and only lasts a fraction of a second. It wouldn't really be worth special casing it but we show 'Installing..' in the info and we'll need to complicate the code a bit to ensure we don't touch that part of the info.

I think this info being a simple string is a bit of recipe for disaster and I was hoping to improve that sometimes soon. What I had in mind was a kinda of a stack/queue where info messages are pushed to, UI shows the last N (1?) messages in separate lines and message pushing code then can remove its info message when appropriate and UI is automatically updated.

Review of attachment 243652 [details] [review]:

Is it bad if we just show "shut down" for a brief period of time, and then set the label back to "installing" right when it reboots? This special casing looks hackish :(

::: src/machine.vala
@@ +69,3 @@
                     pixbuf = draw_vm (orig_pixbuf, SCREENSHOT_WIDTH, SCREENSHOT_HEIGHT);
+
+                if (info == _("Shutoff"))

Can't this be "if (!under_construction)" as well?

(In reply to comment #5)
> I would recommend some sort of icon overlayed on top of machines indicating the
> state of the machine.

Any reason this is not what your patches are doing?

Review of attachment 243652 [details] [review]:

It not bad but more wrong. Its not really a shutdown from users POV but rather a reboot and even that user needs not be caring about.

::: src/machine.vala
@@ +69,3 @@
                     pixbuf = draw_vm (orig_pixbuf, SCREENSHOT_WIDTH, SCREENSHOT_HEIGHT);
+
+                if (info == _("Shutoff"))

we don't need to care about that in here. Also, if info was set to 'Shutoff', vm couldn't have been under construction.

(In reply to comment #12)
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > I would recommend some sort of icon overlayed on top of machines indicating the
> > state of the machine.
> 
> Any reason this is not what your patches are doing?

I'll need our designers help in making/getting an icon and to decide if that is what we want to do.

It would be nice to avoid overlays, maybe just doing a box-shadow and a border would be enough — https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/boxes/boxes-active-box-dropshadow-border.png

/* pseudocss */

.running.thumbnail {
  box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
  border: 1px solid white;
}

Isn't this already solved with bug#683067 ?

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 683067 ***