Emulationstation autostarts focused on blank terminal

[Grol]

Hi, I have Retropie installed on my x86 Ubuntu 22.04 machine. It works fine when I run the emulationstation command from terminal, but when I enable the autostart function the default focus is on a blank terminal window instead of the EmulationStation display. I have to hit alt+tab to get to the application.

Interestingly, when I add emulationstation to the Ubuntu Startup Applications something similar happens. It starts minimized, so once again I need to alt+tab to change focus.

Any idea why this might be happening?

[swangdemon]

@Grol Hey, did you ever find a fix for this? Seems to be a relatively new issue, and so far I’ve had no luck!

[wille]

I hade some trouble with this as well so I created a script that keeps the window active and maximized.
Hope it can help others :)
https://github.com/william-andersson/rpie_run

[mitu]

Does this work on Ubuntu 22.04 ? Using xdotool means you are in an Xorg session, while 22.04 comes by default with Wayland.

[wille]

@mitu I wrote it on Debian 12 with gnome fallback mode (x11)

Edit: I have now tested on Debian with wayland and it seems to work the same. The window refocus if I Alt-Tab. Although it seems that the standard emulationstation executable does not minimize on wayland for me for some reason.

I made a separate script that skips if wayland is in use as I have no issues with it and the first script introduced some weird behaviour..