Hi Evan! On Tue, Dec 22 2020, Evan Straw wrote: > ... When I add a package (like stumpwm) that needs to set > XDG_DATA_DIRS, the problem seems to reappear. ... I think I've had this problem in the past. I'm currently running on a foreign distribution, and I have this in my ~/.profile file: # XDG_DATA_DIRS often starts off empty, but an empty value is # interpreted as this value. Loading a profile can set it, though, # which effectively ignores the default value. We want it to # instead add to the default, so we set it here to the default # value. if [ -z "$XDG_DATA_DIRS" ]; then export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/" fi I think I took the default value from https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s03.html where it says: If $XDG_DATA_DIRS is either not set or empty, a value equal to /usr/local/share/:/usr/share/ should be used. I hope that helps! > Is this a bug, or is it possible I've just misconfigured > something? We should consider this a bug, because Guix's attempt to add to the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable clobbers the default value that foreign distributions are relying on. We should at least document this in the manual, maybe in "(guix) Application Setup". Carlo