aebletrae [she/her]

You wrote this ten minutes after being reminded that “consent” by children is nonsense, in what is still the most approved comment.

If you want to be a successful troll, you are going to have to learn to be less obvious. If you want to discuss topics in good faith, you are going to have to learn that this “just asking questions” approach makes you look like a troll.

The end of “Cogenitor”, where Archer blames Trip for the death of Charles.

Helping one another out is invisibilized, not rare. A good chunk of what I know comes from other people taking the time to explain why something works the way it does and how you can see that for yourself. The rest is from curiosity, experimentation, and hammering away at something until it fits. It’s not professionally specialized knowledge.

Admittedly, I have much less experience with i3, so I fired up a virtual machine with Debian 11.6 and installed i3 (along with lightdm) and was able to recreate the problem of .profile not being executed when logging in, so this isn’t unique to your particular setup. Great!

Fortunately, this combination does execute commands in ~/.xsessionrc, so I added:—

. $HOME/.profile

to that file, then logged out and back in again. That did the trick for me, with the commands in .profile then successfully modifying the PATH variable (and writing additional lines to the execution log files), so I suggest you try creating/modifying .xsessionrc in the same way.

I don’t see them in the app, so not yet, I guess.

Uh, the XiBucks, obviously.

Look, I get it. Hexbear is a demanding place to be. It expects you to not be a complete asshole almost all the time. You’re regularly tested on knowledge of an emoji system so complex, it’s been known to make London cab drivers cry. If you unthinkingly parrot talking points, you’ll be pounced on with annoying facts and aggressive reasonable concern for the value of other people. And if you emit the slightest Hitler particle, you’ll be outright banned. How authoritarian! Honesty, sometimes I wonder why I signed up, never mind stay around.

But then I remember that the folks there are a deeply caring lot, who see the problems in the world and actually want to do something about it—even though the goal often seems barely possible—and, in spite of everything, retain a sense of humour and try to make improvements for each other, even if, for now at least, it can only be a :meow-hug:.

Oh, and the XiBucks, of course. Some of us even get roubles, too!

So Jealous, Tegan and Sara

But those kinds of initialisations belong in .profile (or, if you’re using a weird desktop environment, its own configuration file), particularly if you want .desktop files to work. (In .bashrc, PATH will grow longer in each subshell, which shouldn’t cause problems but is wasteful.)

So, what desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, etc.) are you using?

.profile is executed by login shells for the benefit of it and its subshells, and by DEs like Cinnamon for the benefit of .desktop launchers at login.

So, have you logged out and back in again since adding these lines to .profile?

And of course, the .profile has to be executed properly for its configuration to take effect, so it`s useful to know if the problem is with those specific lines, or the file as a whole.

Add:—

date >> ~/profile-execution-log-top.txt
echo $PATH >> ~/profile-execution-log-top.txt

to the top of .profile, and:—

date >> ~/profile-execution-log-end.txt
echo $PATH >> ~/profile-execution-log-end.txt

to the bottom of .profile (use alternative paths as you see fit) to monitor that activity. You can test this by sourcing .profile but the real test is logging out and in again. Look at the time when you do this so you can correlate each action with each timestamp in the log files. If .profile is executed to completion, you should have two files with matching timestamps but different PATHs. If you don’t have a matching timestamp in the “end” log file, there’s a problem mid-execution. If neither file is being updated, .profile isn’t being executed at all.

Since .bashrc is executed for all non-login shells, it shouldn’t really source .profile, which is only meant for login shells, and might trigger expensive activity. (.profile might source .bashrc, but that`s fine.)

Are other lines in .profile being executed, or is the whole file ignored? Have you logged out and in again since adding these lines?

Ah, Enhanced, the folks that brought us interrogation.