Sujet : Where Do GUI Errors Go Now? De : ldo (at) *nospam* nz.invalid (Lawrence D'Oliveiro) Groupes :comp.os.linux.misc Date : 09. Jun 2025, 01:56:32 Autres entêtes Organisation : A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID :<1025bfv$5aur$1@dont-email.me> User-Agent : Pan/0.162 (Pokrosvk)
When running a GUI on X11, there is a file called ~/.xsession-errors, which is basically the destination for stderr for all programs launched from the GUI. So any error messages they output can be viewed here.
There can be quite a lot of clutter here. Also it’s amazing to see GUI toolkits report “critical” errors during normal execution of some apps. But this can also be useful for troubleshooting. Like the time a user reported trouble with some display function in a proprietary app (I foget which) after an upgrade to a new machine. I got in and watched as he went through the steps, and soon saw an error message that it was trying to launch xfig, which was not found.
It only took a minute to install that package, ask him to try again, and confirm that it worked.
But anyway, seems there is no equivalent in Wayland-based GUIs. Does stderr from a GUI-launched app just get thrown away now?