[josephdadams]

Summary

Several command handlers used Linux branches that no longer work on mainstream distributions, and one packaging choice made the released build hard to run. This fixes them without changing macOS or Windows behavior — every change is confined to the Linux code path, and the darwin/win32 branches are byte-identical to before.

What was broken on Linux

Issue	Effect	Fix
robotjs imported at module scope in inputHandlers	The command table pulls this file in, so a native module that failed to build or load took down the whole app — runScript included, not just sendInput	Lazy, cached load on first use; throws CommandError(501) with a platform-specific hint
lock shelled out to gnome-screensaver-command	Absent from modern GNOME (removed years ago on Ubuntu, never present on RHEL 9)	loginctl lock-session, falling back to xdg-screensaver lock, then the old command
shutdown / reboot / shutdown_cancel used sudo	spawn gives sudo no TTY to prompt on, so these silently failed	Go through systemd, which authorizes an active local session via polkit
"Run at Login"	app.setLoginItemSettings is macOS/Windows only — the checkbox wrote to the store and did nothing	New helpers/autoLaunch.ts writes an XDG autostart entry
focusApp required wmctrl	Not installed by default on any distro	Falls back to xdotool
quitApp used pkill -f	Matched the entire command line, so it could kill bystander processes	pkill -x, matching the process name

Packaging

• Ship deb and rpm alongside AppImage. Ubuntu 22.04+ no longer ships libfuse2, so the AppImage fails with a libfuse.so.2 load error on a stock modern Ubuntu. Native packages sidestep FUSE entirely and give RPM distros a first-class install.
• Pin CI to ubuntu-22.04 (was ubuntu-latest, now 24.04). The native module compiled on the runner links against the build host's glibc, so building on 24.04 (2.39) produced artifacts too new for Ubuntu 22.04 (2.35) and RHEL 9 (2.34). Building on the oldest supported distro widens compatibility.
• Added rpm to the Linux apt step for the new target.

Incidental hardening

While making the Linux shutdown path shell-free I noticed the shutdown command's time parameter was completely unvalidated and interpolated into the macOS osascript -e string. Added assertNonNegativeInteger with test coverage. Valid input behaves exactly as before on every platform.

Not fixable in code

Two Linux limitations remain, for the record:

• Tray icon needs a StatusNotifier host. Ubuntu ships ubuntu-appindicators enabled so it works there, but stock GNOME (RHEL 9, Fedora, Debian GNOME) shows nothing — and since Settings and Quit live only in the tray menu, that leaves no way to set the password or port short of hand-editing config.json. Worth considering a non-tray settings path separately.
• sendInput cannot work under Wayland. robotjs is X11/XTest-only, and Ubuntu 22.04+ and RHEL 9 both default to Wayland. The new error message says so explicitly instead of failing opaquely.

Also noted, deliberately left alone

runSystemCommand returns void, so every await runSystemCommand(...) in the command table is a no-op — failures reach the socket but never the caller's return value, meaning a lock on a box without loginctl still reports "System locked." Fixing that changes error propagation on all three platforms, so it felt out of scope here.

Testing

• yarn build clean, yarn test 17/17 passing (one new test for the validator).
• Verified under Electron on macOS that the new dynamic import yields all six robotjs methods sendInputCommand uses, so input simulation is unaffected.
• Booted the app on macOS: tray loads, server comes up on 8810, /commands and getFonts respond, password check still rejects bad credentials.
• Did not execute a valid shutdown for obvious reasons.

Version bumped 1.9.0 → 1.10.0 (minor: working Linux autostart and the new package targets are user-facing additions, not just fixes).

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