This is the 4th time I have tried to send to the list but ff wants to insist I send it to mgb. So I'm going to compose this the last time. Re the sudo -E: from wheezy thru jessie and stretch its been required since X would not allow root to use it without it, but I just went to a buster machine and I'll be dipped, it worked without the -E on a buster/xfce4 install. But I've become quite fam with "sudo chown -R gene:gene /home/gene" to fix such wonky perms because of it. Why it took debian 3 major version updates to fix it boggles my mind. Now, where was I. stuck in a one window jail cuz I can't get trinity to load and work. What I do know is that if I'm not using gdm3, I lose sudo rights as lightdm and tdm-trinity all want an admin pw and that doesn't exist. my sudo pw doesn't work. So lets start, one step at a time, what do I do to fix this? Thanks Mike, gene