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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

> Let me guess: it's still impossible to minimize a full screen game on Linux or alt-tab etc.

You can hardly blame SDL for this, games are not really what X11 was designed for. Setting up full screen and asking for exclusive access to the keyboard will prevent the window manager from doing anything to it.

My solution for this problem: use a window manager that can full screen any window and switch back.

> and the joystick will still not be recognized if you plug it in after the game starts.

To be fair, 99% of AAA games don't support joystick hotplugging either. It's really annoying.

Since you have not checked whether this is actually the situation and do not properly understand the other components in the equation, I find your attitude offensive.

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> You can hardly blame SDL for this, games are not really what X11 was designed for.

It's funny how the Windows version of the game usually works just fine in Wine, minimization and window switching included.

> Setting up full screen and asking for exclusive access to the keyboard will prevent the window manager from doing anything to it.

Then why are they asking for exclusive access to the keyboard in the first place? X has rich input protocols (XInput2 was recently designed).

> Since you have not checked whether this is actually the situation

True, but I have read the changelog, and it doesn't mention any of these two annoying problems to be fixed. Part of the reason I made this comment is to see if someone else knows whether they were fixed.

IIRC, there was a presentation by Valve where they complained that even if you don't do a keyboard grab, some window managers do it for you when you request a fullscreen window.

For an SDL2-using game, I tried BrütalLegend and alt-tab works as you'd expect when using OpenBox. I usually just run games in a separate X server with just OpenBox to isolate them from messing with my main desktop. Plus, they can't block ctrl+alt+F7.

> and do not properly understand the other components in the equation

Even though I believe I do, this is irrelevant, all the end user sees is that it doesn't work, he doesn't care about the architectural problems of the window system. It's extremely annoying when you have to exit the game to look something up (probably related to the game itself), or do anything else, especially considering how long modern games take to load.

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