Bug 1324881

I'm not sure, but this is how I understand things:

It to has something to do with desktop environments.  If you run it in Gnome or some other environments you don't see anything, just as you say.  But if you use an old-fashioned, simple, environment, it works as it should.  I tried using the "User script" session and ran "twm".  I also tried a wmx session and got it to work.

Probably the newer environments don't use the actual X root window but spans another bottom window over it.  So xpenguins works in a way, but it is hidden by other windows and thus in practice not visible.  Or something along those lines, I'm guessing here.

I'm not sure what to do about it.  Most people of course use modern environments and thus xpenguins is useless for all but a few.  Rewriting xpenguins to handle new environments is probably a significant job, and outside the scope of simply packaging it.

Maybe it is time to give up and realise that xpenguins is too old for the modern world.  Maybe I should just orphan the package.

Hello Goran, 
It makes sense, because I could see that the process was running at the gnome system monitor. 
Don't orphan the package. My suggestion
Just do what you can and what you want. 
Even if it runs for LXDE or XFCE that is still quite good. 
I have not tried it in KDE to see if it works or not.

The best I can think of is to warn about the problem in the description, and to blacklist environments where it is known not to work in the desktop file.  I asked about it on the devel list (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/NJGU2M4VMYDYI4GN5KUW2ZONNEC6QJXW/) and there were no better suggestions.

So now I'll just try to figure out which environments XPenguins work in, and which it doesn't.

Installing all the desktops I could find on a virtual machine, I managed to see the penguins in the following environments:

awesome
dwm
i3
ratpoison
xfce
xmonad
openbox

On the other hand, the following seems to hide them:

LXDE
cinnamon
lxqt
mate
plasma
sugar
gnome
gnome-classic

The names above are the names in the variable XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP.  That's not always the same as should be listed in the desktop file, and not all of them seem to have any official name there (https://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apb.html).  But I'll do as good as I can in the desktop file.

xpenguins-2.2-14.fc24 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 24. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-a0a255ca8f

xpenguins-2.2-14.fc23 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 23. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-f7fac1c624

xpenguins-2.2-14.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-a0a255ca8f

xpenguins-2.2-14.fc23 has been pushed to the Fedora 23 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-f7fac1c624

xpenguins-2.2-14.fc23 has been pushed to the Fedora 23 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

xpenguins-2.2-14.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.