oh no, did you try raking the snow? It might have a higher success rate than going by hand.

More time for shoveling all that snow! :D

I've been on #Ubunutu/#Pop!_OS for ages, so i don't have another thing to go back to. 😅 But since i'm using #XSession & #i3wm i could probably just switch to #Debian and barely notice. Maybe even have more up to date software? 🤔

Based on gdm3 source I think I see what's happened:
1) #gdm3 has a different /etc/X11/Xsession?
2) gdm3 runs everything through /etc/X11/Xsession by default
3) #Cosmic invokes startx instead (no Xsession)
4) #Pop!_OS 22.04 -> 24.04 removes gdm3 and switches to Cosmic.
5) No more /etc/X11/Xsession

😞

I was already leaning to thinking that this would fix the issue, given all the searching through startx and xinit source. But this #Ubuntu wiki article sealed the deal: wiki.ubuntu.com/CustomXSession

A real simple "here's how you wire .xinitrc with Xsession" that clicked everything into place.

Turns out it's all software all the way down. There's just so many different conventions / apis that need to be understood.

There's a really interesting story here about debugging problems that occur deep in a system when they're caused by a simple issue at a higher layer.

The fix turns out to be simple: add an entry to /usr/share/xsessions that runs /etc/X11/Xsession, and select that during login.

So simple, and yet so much time spent tracking this down...

Conflicting documentation for #X11 suggests that ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsessionrc files can be filled in for use, but this is only true if the X Client application is /etc/X11/Xsession. #Pop!_OS was directly using my window manager #i3wm instead, and causing all those bits of config to be ignored.

Things I learned:

- #SystemD --user is not a session, but #SystemD does support sessions.
- #X11 startup is surprisingly simple.
- So much outdated documentation for #X11.

I'm struggling (more than I want to admit) to create a 22.04 disk image that I could use to determine package version changes. Learning #Debian packaging and repository layout isn't something I wanted to do. 😓 Maybe `apt source` will be sufficient?

This occurred across the 22.04 to 24.04 LTS upgrade. But exactly which package changed it's config to cause the issue is not yet clear to me.

I think #Pop!_OS switched up a lot in that upgrade? They moved off of GDM to their own display manager & desktop environment implementation: COSMIC.

Silver lining: learning a lot about #X11, session management, #Systemd user sessions, and desktop environments / window managers.

And people wonder why we joke that furries run the internet. <3

On considering accepting floating point values, there's a wonderful RFC noting how Postel's law is a bad idea: datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc...