Re: programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system

[Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com>]

Thanks Stefan for your reply.

Stefan: i think you're right, that's sort of my experience as well,
although sometimes some programs feel more broken in one environment
than another.  (Like, with a certain desktop, iirc, some programs made
good use of having a right click on the dock, some didn't, and some
only got boiler plate icons or none at all on the dock.   I don't want
to name the desktop which showed these issues up in such stark relief
because my memory may be faulty, it is probably an old version by now,
and no point for me to be provocative over tentative plans!)

Thanks Tomas for the two links.  If i were programming in perl, the
first link would be right to the point.  And the second list looks
like it would be a good source to draw some testing targets from.

Thanks again everybody for the education.

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 8:39 AM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> Could i identify the environment by inspecting the file system (for
>> example)?  (I imagine the answer there must be 'no', because different
>> users could have different environments but necessarily share the same
>> file system, but maybe i'm making some unjustified assumptions?)
>
> That's right.  Most of my systems have both Gnome and XFCE installed at
> the same time, and some of them have both active at the same time (for
> different users running on different virtual terminals).
>
> Also, the meaning of "desktop environment" is not completely clear
> anyway: I've used the same programs (mostly ctwm, Emacs, Xterm, and
> Firefox) for many years now, first without a so-called desktop
> environment, then under Gnome2, then shortly under Gnome3 and now
> under XFCE.  To the untrained eye, all 4 situations result in pretty
> much the exact same behavior and the exact same appearance.
>
>
>         Stefan
>