~/.gnomerc is not loaded anymore at startup

[Kentaro]

I have clean-installed Focal and configured to run X.org server instead of Wayland, and found that the ~/.gnomerc is not loaded anymore.

In /etc/X11/Xsession.d/55gnome-session_gnomerc, it tries to load ~/.gnomerc but it fails because of the change of the gnome-session's startup process.

Let's see this part of the 55gnome-session_gnomerc:

BASESTARTUP=${STARTUP%% *}
BASESTARTUP=${BASESTARTUP##*/}
if [ "$BASESTARTUP" = x-session-manager ]; then
    BASESTARTUP=$(basename $(readlink /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager))
fi
case "$BASESTARTUP" in
  gnome-session*)
    GNOMERC=$HOME/.gnomerc
    if [ -r "$GNOMERC" ]; then
      . "$GNOMERC"
    fi

In Bionic, at the time of launching 55gnome-session_gnomerc, the value of $STARTUP is "gnome-session" and it works properly. In Focal, however, the value of $STARTUP is
"env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=ubuntu /usr/bin/gnome-session --systemd --session=ubuntu",
and $BASESTARTUP became "env", then it skips loading ~/.gnomerc.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thanks for the bug report. Please also report it to the developers at:

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-session/-/issues

and then tell us the new issue ID.

[Kentaro (kentarofukuchi)]

I think we should not post this bug report to the upstream's BTS because this bug only occus on Ubuntu.

Here are some background info. '55gnome-session_gnomerc' is created by Debian and not included in the original tarball of gnome-session, and it perfectly works on Debian.

So why it fails on Ubuntu? Ubuntu's 'ubuntu-session' package provides '/usr/share/xsessions/ubuntu.desktop' file that executes gnome-session by the following command line:

env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=ubuntu /usr/bin/gnome-session --systemd --session=ubuntu

For comparison, on Debian, '/usr/share/xsessions/gnome.desktop' simply calls '/usr/bin/gnome-session'.

In conclusion, 1) Ubuntu activates /usr/bin/gnome-session in a non-standard way, and 2) 55gnome-session_gnomerc does not expect it.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report and details, low priority issue because it's not a file commonly used but still would be nice to fix the feature for people relying on it

[t0pd4wn (t0pd4wn)]

It would be nice if this issue could be reevaluated in favor to support .gnomerc, as it enables to execute specific commands once at system startup.

[Kentaro (kentarofukuchi)]

The same issue has been reproduced in Jammy (22.04.1).

The following patch for 55gnome-session_gnomerc is a workaround that fixes this issue.

5c5
< if [ "$BASESTARTUP" = x-session-manager ]; then
---
> if [ "$BASESTARTUP" = x-session-manager ] || [ "$BASESTARTUP" = env ]; then