>at least with systemd controlled start (but possibly also before Since forever.
>So, what standard approach should we take as developers here? Personally I would say developers should avoid having a system installed KDE, you're only making life harder for yourself. Then things are relatively easy. You still have to do some editing of /etc/ but only once and you have no confusions. ---- But I appreciate that's not a good solution for everyone. So to brainstorm some options. For systemd services I couldn't find a good solution so on a dev session on startup they copy all relevant files to $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/whatever then reload everything. This is copied from gnome (I think they then run a nested systemd --user maybe dbus too?) https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/blob/master/login-sessions/startplasma-dev.sh.cmake ---- I did start another idea. If you populate the dev session environment variables *really* early must we even go through pam you can set your XDG_DATA_DIRS before DBus daemon has loaded it will then have the right stuff. I made a patch doing that: https://github.com/sddm/sddm/pull/1370 which is merged but not released: It's not perfect, you still have the issue of polkit/system dbus. It also has a scope of lasting for the duration that the user is logged in, not the duration you're in Plasma; but probably fixes 90% of cases. David
