Hi, I tried to share some of the xfce config files over several of my accounts in order to have the same settings everywhere. I therefore created symlinks in .config/xfce4/ and .config/xfce4/mcs_settings . Unfortunately, whenever anything is changed in the xfce config, xfce removes the config file (and thus the symlink) and replaces it with a new file, thus destroying symlinks. regards Hadmut
Of course. Config files are written atomically, which means: (1) write_to(temp_file) (2) rename(temp_file, config_file) (3) unlink(temp_file)
Yup. But that's the problem, not the solution. (btw: that's wrong. The way you describe it step 3 is pointless) The config files should honor links and do the procedure at the place where the links points to. E.g. if the link points to /somewhere/file then the write/rename should be done in /somewhere/, not in ~/.config regards Hadmut
Nope, symlinks for config files are not really that important. More important is that the files are written atomically to be crash safe and esp. avoid locking/race conditions when more than one program writes to a config file. I don't really see the need for your setup anyway. How often do you change your config? Once per hour? If not, you'll usually setup your desktop once and afterwards simply copy the files over to the other account. Voila. If you want to permanently share all configurations between several accounts on the same machine, you could also just set XDG_CONFIG_HOME to point to a shared folder for configs.