You need to understand how your Desktop environment is being initialized. It is
started by the Display Manager, thus inherit whatever environment variable is
sourced by the DM. To have the DM be aware of custom variables, it needs to
source that information from a file from your home directory. The file itself
depends on the DM and/or DE, on how it's been written, because this hasn't been
standardized.

At the core, all they are doing is starting a Xorg session. Which means that
/etc/X11/Xsession is being involved. I remember having to change something in
order to make xfce aware of additional PATH entries, but I since then changed my
DE to KDE. I can't remember the steps I had to take. It probably has to do with
a file present in /etc/xdg/xfce4

You could try your luck with ~/.xsessionrc though.

Cheers,
                 Ludovic

On Thu, 28 Jul 2022, o1bigtenor wrote:

>On Thu, Jul 28, 2022 at 8:44 AM Ludovic Bellière wrote:
>>
>> That would be an environment variable. It has to be written into a file sourced
>> by your DM, each has their own standard. For KDE/sddm, you can look into
>> /etc/sddm/Xsession to see which file correspond to your system (it's different
>> whether you use bash or zsh or whatever else).
>>
>Hm - - - - did some snooping around in /etc/ . . . where I see that lxdm is
>the default-display-manager yet when I'm looking in the lxqt session settings
>there I'm told that xfwm4 is my window manager.
>(This doesn't help me figuring out what's wrong - - - that's for sure.)
>
>Dunno what having these two things different does.
>
>I can't find a neat place where anything is said about xscreensaver
>and that it
>run like this and do this (except in the xscreensaver setup dialog boxes).
>
>I'm thinking this is somehow browser related but I can't find anywhere to
>kick the browsers in their collective pants (don't care if I perhaps
>break their
>necks in the process either) so that the screensaver can shut of the screens.
>
>Appreciate the ideas and am chasing any one of them as far as I can - - grin!
>
>TIA