Does anyone here play games? Is anyone facing any issues? It’s probably been about six months since I started using FVWM3, and instead of enjoying it, I’m still struggling with it. And the struggle isn’t about any specific “wants” but rather just getting the standard settings to work properly, which are hidden and scattered all over the place. Are we really all so different that it’s impossible to set up something good enough for everyone by default?
Anyway, that’s not the main point—I’ve already managed to solve some of the issues.
Here’s my question: What exactly do I need to configure so that my game in Steam can launch in fullscreen mode without freezing?
Current situation: I’m running FVWM3 with xfce4-panel. When I open the game Dota 2, there’s a gap at the bottom set by EwmhBaseStruts screen $[monitor.primary] 0 0 0 30 for the panel. This gap, of course, doesn’t disappear on its own when an application requests fullscreen, which is not at all intuitive. Fine, can I launch the game without the panel at all? No, I can’t. The game just stops responding—it doesn’t actually crash but instead continues running in the background somehow. But as soon as I try to focus on it, it freezes, and nothing is clickable. What needs to be done to make this work properly in 2024? Is there a specific solution?
FVWM3 isn’t going to be for everybody – it’s something which does require some perseverance, and understanding, but the benefit is that you might just end up with something which suits your needs.
We’ve spent quite bit of time over the years changing and documenting the default-config – this really does provide a commented set of instructions with the relevant commands, explaining what everything is doing. Beyond this, as a starting point, there’s not much else we can really do. The rest is down to the individual user to start thinking about what they want, and to ask questions.
Of course, what we’ve come up with in terms of a default-config is subjective – if you don’t like it – change it. That’s the point here.
I love it when people, like yourself, start mentioning “What needs to be done to make this work properly in 2024”, as if: 1) The year is somehow important, and 2) There’s something different that can be done.
It’s a really good approach – keep doing that – I’m sure other projects will appreciate it.
As for Steam… I have no idea. I don’t use it, wouldn’t know how to.
What you can do though is the following:
Put fvwm3 into verbose mode: pkill -USR2 fvwm3 – this will start logging information to $[FVWM_USERDIR]/fvwm3-output.txt which is typically: ~/.fvwm/fvwm3-output.txt.
Start Steam without it being in fullscreen mode, and run xprop on the window.
Put Steam in fullscreen, and run xprop on the window.
The best solution is to create custom styles for troublesome games/full screen applications to ensure they work as expected.
I do not play Dota so I can’t give you a definitive answer. I will asume that Dota plays as a borderless window as many modern games seems to do this days. Something like this should help you with your problem:
Where foo is the name fro Dota executable. FvwmIdent can help you find out what it is or how the dota window identifies itself. !Title, NoHandles, BorderWidth 0 shouldn’t be needed. The options are there in case I’m wrong about the borderless window. This options mitigate issues I have had with other games.