programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system

From	Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com>
Newsgroups	linux.debian.user
Subject	programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system
Date	2017-03-17 06:20 +0100
Message-ID	<tlSsW-15A-1@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
Organization	linux.* mail to news gateway

Show all headers | View raw

Is there a programmatic way that a piece of software can learn what
desktop environment it is executing in?

For example, i'm using xfce, and i can tell that i'm using xfce by
clicking on 'Applications' in the top menu bar and there's this item
that says 'About Xfce'; if you click on it it it looks like one of
these gtk about-windows.  (It even gives a version number.)

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?)

TIA for any clues or thoughts on this.

dan

Back to linux.debian.user | Previous | Next — Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> - 2017-03-17 06:20 +0100
  Re: programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system Dominik George <nik@naturalnet.de> - 2017-03-17 06:50 +0100
  Re: programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2017-03-17 09:10 +0100
    Re: programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> - 2017-03-18 04:20 +0100
      Re: programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system tomas@tuxteam.de - 2017-03-18 10:30 +0100
  Re: programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2017-03-18 17:00 +0100
    Re: programmatically determining the desktop environment of a system Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> - 2017-03-19 19:20 +0100

csiph-web