@thomasadam @thindil I agree it doesn't make sense to rely on some unofficial extension that maybe every "desktop environment" implements differently.

The .desktop file added now will hopefully allow to just pick #fvwm3 for your X session in any compliant display manager. If you want to integrate it with e.g. #KDE (I assume this would still work perfectly fine!), well, write your own ~/.xsession for now 😉

@thindil @thomasadam How exactly would that work? I mean, I *did* use #fvwm2 "inside" #KDE a long time ago, but scripted the ~/.xsession for that manually ...

So, if there's some .desktop file for #fvwm3 with "Type=XSession", would e.g. sddm offer me a session "Plasma+FVWM3" or something like that when plasma is installed as well? 🤔

@thomasadam I probably *should* have looked at the FDO spec in the first place, instead of just comparing to "what is KDE doing", assuming this would be correct 🙈 still really surprised me it wasn't. I meanwhile updated the #FreeBSD port again to deliver the fixed file (who knows, maybe some display manager would choke on it otherwise) until #fvwm3 1.0.8 is done. So, thanks for *thorough* checking! 👍

#fvwm3 actually merged my "pull request" to add some .desktop file for the #XSession upstream, a topic that came up in a #FreeBSD #ports PR.

It was very quick, and during review conversations, I even learned that KDE delivers a "broken" .desktop file (by FDO standards) which somehow still works 🙈

Anyways, kudos for handling it that quickly. Any porter/packager is thankful for upstreams *that* responsive! 👍
https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/commit/b3bd394a87d4caab846e1e36be560330901bef27

Got over it and created an upstream PR for #fvwm3!

Well, I *knew* I would run into some #autotools foo. Can't use #autoconf to substitute @bindir@ in the .desktop file, it expands to ${exec_prefix}/bin (literally) 😜

https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/pull/876

Just thought #GNU #autotools was the worst build system ever, when I suddenly remembered #MSBuild.

Context, should "upstream" some change to #fvwm3 which was now done locally in the #FreeBSD #port, and upstream uses autotools.

dnl #M4 sux! 😏

And now, this issue is fixed in #FreeBSD's #fvwm3 #port. I'm amazed nobody reported it so far, I assumed there are quite some fans of fvwm out there 😉
https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=3e35051e913e46e0132df070d5a718d443bfd0b8

As a #FreeBSD #ports maintainer, I *love* it when upstream projects are that responsive 👍

Testing the "fix" reverting a possibly problematic commit right now on my personal desktop, if it works well and doesn't break anything else, there might be an update to the #fvwm3 port in the next days!

https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/issues/873

My current desktop is pictured here. Courtesy of: #fvwm3, #tint2 (the bar on top), a bunch of custom widgets in the tint2-bar, #Memphis98 as gtk-theme, qt's built-in Windown-like theme, #GkrellM on the right.

I idly attempted to move to #fvwm3 from my current #fvwm2 setup (with a somewhat old fvwm2 version), using the same configuration file, but things didn't go. All my colour settings seemed to drop out, among other visual oddities. Oh well, something for the future.

(My current setup works fine so my energy and motivation for switching is not high. I tried it now because of the libX11 issues; if it needs fvwm fixes, they'll likely only be made to fvwm3.)

Heads up #fvwm people: it appears that libX11 1.8.x and fvwm may not get along very well (and in Fedora 37, the combination appears to make the X server unhappy too). libX11 1.8 apparently has a number of internal changes to be more 'correct' (in accordance with API documentation) that may make clients unhappy, cf https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/merge_requests/150

(found by @leah when I hit my libX11 1.8 problems in Fedora 37. I'm on #fvwm2 but maybe this applies to #fvwm3 too.)

@anubhav #archlinux #fvwm3 maintenance is in a state of flux right now.

Turned out I was not the only one who had experienced FvwmIconMan, of #FVWM3, crash ( https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/issues/659 ).

#FreeBSD port maintainer Felix Palmen had provided a patch ( https://bz-attachments.freebsd.org/attachment.cgi?id=235437 ; original PR:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=265291 ) that had fixed the issue for me.

The patch was then used by OpenBSD port maintainer.

An Arch user is also suffering from the issue; does not seem that the patch supplied had been used (to compile fvwm3).

#fvwm #trivia!

for #fvwm1 (and for a time, #fvwm2), the man page used to have a BUGS section which listed the following:

As of fvwm 0.99 there were exactly 39.342 unidentified bugs. Identified bugs have mostly been fixed, though. Since then 9.34 bugs have been fixed.

Assuming that there are at least 10 unidentified bugs for every identified one, that leaves us with 39.342 - 9.32 + 10 * 9.34 = 123.402 unidentified bugs. If we follow this to its logical conclusion we will have an infinite number of unidentified bugs before the number of bugs can start to diminish, at which point the program will be bug-free.

Since this is a computer program infinity = 3.4028e+38 if you don't insist on double-precision. At the current rate of bug discovery we should expect to achieve this point in 3.37e+27 years

I guess I better plan on passing this thing on to my children....

The "I" here refers to Robert Nation, the original creator of #fvwm and #rxvt.

As it happens, I've not been able to reduce the number of bugs in #fvwm3 either, and I've no grandchildren...

#X11 #archaic application time!

#xzoom is a magnifier for X11, allowing for portions of windows or the desktop to be magnified.

#xzoom was originally written May 30th 1996, by Itai Nahshon.

Version 0.3 only supported 8-bit colour displays, but version 0.4 onward is maintained, and this supports upto 24-bit displays, and it's this version which most Linux distributions, and *BSD still ship to this day.

I've been using this program for years, and I find it really useful debugging window decorations in #fvwm3, as I can zoom in at detail to see how the rendering looks pixel-by-pixel.

Sharing a screenshot of my #slackware 15.0 #fvwm3 desktop built on #pkgsrc.

Stepping back from my #fvwm as it's doing my head in at the moment. I may need to get the #fvwm3 package anyways as I am getting a lot of conflicts. I have now turned to jwm and am having some fun with it.

Just installed fvwm3 for the nostalgia and ... well yes that certainly does look basically how I remember it holy shit.

Sadly I can't find any of my old configs to test out a more funtctional/pretty desktop but I'm glad to see it still just kinda works like it used to.

#linux #fvwm #fvwm3