It is really, really not the terminal emulator's job to set basic environment variables.
It should either be done by the environment in which gnome-terminal is started (e.g. systemd --user), so that the terminal just transparently passes this on; or should be done by the shell initialization files, as in your workaround.
It is really, really not the terminal emulator's job to set basic environment variables.
It should either be done by the environment in which gnome-terminal is started (e.g. systemd --user), so that the terminal just transparently passes this on; or should be done by the shell initialization files, as in your workaround.