Bug#1037084: bookworm: When using gdm3 to start non-GNOME wayland sessions, PATH may be set differently
Package: release-notes
X-Debbugs-Cc: jlsantos@protonmail.com
Severity: important
Starting non-GNOME wayland sessions through GDM leads to a user's PATH
being set to
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
instead of /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
(from /etc/profile).
Example: Starting sway or plasma-workspace-wayland through gdm and
trying to launch
lutris or gnome-chess only to find out that they won't start even
though they are
installed. It can take some time for a user to find out that the PATH
environment
variable is different.
This is a regression in bookworm and can surprise users upgrading from bullseye.
Possible workarounds are: Using a different display manager such as
sddm or starting
the wayland session through tty.
I first discovered this bug after installing lutris a few months
ago[0] and filed
a few bug reports[1][2]. As bookworm is about to be released, I thought it may
be worthwhile to document this unexpected behavior in its release notes.
0: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1028543
1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=942131
2: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/issues/846
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