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0 pointsdathinab4y ago0 comments

> This hints at a very crude way to determine the desktop environment!

That is a good discovery.

It's probably one of the better ways to detect the running desktop environment as the user might have multiple environments installed and just uses one of them currently, as such looking for installed things doesn't work reliable.

And looking for env variables can be unreliable.

And scanning the dbug might not be that use-full either.

But I'm not sure what they use that for. (Notification daemon selection? But that wouldn't be that reliable either, theaming? I dubt it.)

But I guess even if it's just for telemetry it would be a reasonable thing to do.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

dllthomas4y ago· 2 in thread

I mean, in principle the user might be running multiple X servers with different WMs, but that's probably rare enough. I'm also a bit curious what it's actually used for (but not quite curious enough to dig out ghidra, given the other constraints on my time at the moment...)

jcelerier4y ago

> I mean, in principle the user might be running multiple X servers with different WMs, but that's probably rare enough

I actually do that all the time. My main "work environment" is TTY0 with i3wm, but when I make nice videos/screencasts, or use Zoom for presentations I often switch to a clean and neat KDE Plasma session on TTY1.

dathinabOP4y ago

There was a time when I was playing around with programming/changing small WMs, while following Java based university stuff.

During that time I often had a "IntelliJ" only instance of X running in some TTY1, some other WM or just a raw TTY on TTY2 and a maybe crashing WM I was playing around with on TTY0 ;-)

Fun times.

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