This bug report was migrated from our old Bugzilla tracker.

Reported in version: 2.0.9
Reported for operating system, platform: Linux, x86_64

Comments on the original bug report:

On 2019-05-05 10:11:09 +0000, Markus Ewald wrote:

SDL isn't able to display message boxes on any Linux+KDE system I've tried.

My main workstation, also experiencing the issue, is running Gentoo Linux 4.19.27 with KDE Plasma 5.14.5.

GDB shows that it's running into SDL_x11messagebox.c, X11_ShowMessageBox(). The calls to pipe() and fork() succeed. However, somewhat further along, line 858 as of version 2.0.9, the first call to read() from the pipe fails.

This may indicate that the forked process immediately exited.

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I can reproduce this on all Linux machines I have access to (all running Gentoo).

It is reproducible in all cases by simply compiling the message box example from the SDL wiki: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_ShowMessageBox

I've tried with Gentoo's official ebuild of SDL2, the libraries from Epic's Unreal Engine 4 dependency repo and SDL2 2.0.9 built by myself. Same issue in all cases.