Custom User Directories

In certain cases an administrator may want to customize the XDG Base Directories that are used for a user session.

This may be useful in cases where multiple versions of an operating system share a home directory for whatever reason (NFS shares for example).

GDM 3.6 and later have included support for this.

Let's take one example and walk through how to do it.

Example 1

I have GNOME 3.6 and GNOME 3.8 sharing a single home directory over NFS. I want to support simultaneous or alternating logins between them. I don't want I want to use separate configuration directories for each so that the newer version doesn't interfere with the older one.

So I want to set XDG_CONFIG_DIR=$HOME/.config-$OS_ENV_VERSION

Create a file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/99-override-xdg-dirs.sh and include something like:

export XDG_CONFIG_DIR=$HOME/.config-$OS_ENV_VERSION

NOTE: This requires a fix for bug 674900

Example 2

I want to store separate session logs for simultaneous logins.

Create a file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/99-override-xsession-errors.sh and include something like:

exec >& $HOME/.cache/gdm/session-$HOSTNAME.log