Fedora rejects something from systemd
date: April 1
source: Phoronix
Yeah no, good try tho. Had me hopeful for 6 seconds.
Fedora Discourse thread (started on 1 March 2026) : https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f45-change-proposal-use-systemd-for-managing-per-user-environment-variables-selfcontained/182885 Fedora devel-announce post (sent on 10 March 2026) : https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VOMOY2CBIY25324AFD52UAZVPTQUOIRN/ Proposal on Fedora wiki (Created on 10 March 2026) : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseSystemdForManagingPerUserEnvironmentVariables Proposal on Pagure (opened on 25 March 2026, rejected on 1 April 2026) : https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3582
At the risk of being serious, there’s really no good way to set user environment variables. (It’s been a while since I last checked, so I might be wrong)
PAM used to have an equivalent to their
/etc/environmentfor users, but that was deprecated or maybe removed last I checked.Systemd user environment variables don’t apply in a shell context
.bashrc only works if you use bash as login shell and I’m not sure if it applies everywhere. Sure, I can set stuff in the shell I use, but it feels weird to modify my shell in order to change global environment variables.
It sounds like you’ve looked into this before, so I’ll ask you: what is the use-case for per-user environment variables that can’t be achieved trivially through
~/.bashrcor/etc/profile?It sounds to me like the problem they want to solve is that there is some piece of information which needs to be present in the environment for every process that a user runs regardless of the context it was executed from (eg.
$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS)?In which case it would surely be served better by being contained in a config file in a standard location where it can be read by every process that needs that info instead of the executing process having to know the information and pass it in the environment, for every possible caller and calling context.
Yeah it’s such a mess. Last I tried I had to set my variable in like 3 different places and it still didn’t apply everywhere I expected it to.
