Please keep replies on list so they're available for others to see and learn from or to correct my mistakes. I'm moving this back on list but privacy rules prevent me from quoting to the list what you sent me off

list.

Sorry, but webmail seems to be allergic to mailing lists.

>You have told us that you have used "sudo -E ..." although you haven't >told us why you used "-E". What "-E" does is run as root but on your >own home folder, not root's. This can easily leave stuff in your home >folder which is owned by root and cannot be handled by your regular

>user account and that can cause all kinds of breakage. You might be >able to fix it with something like "chown -R ..." and "chgrp -R ..." >but that might make things worse.

I'm well aware of that, but since wheezy to now, it was required because root had no permissions to use the users xwindows. So if I wanted to run synaptic, I had to use the -E.

There was no other choice till now. If I don't need it now, and apparently I don't, the >biggest pain in the ass ever has finally been fixed after at least 4 major debian updates but now I'll have to learn to "sudo chown -R gene:gene /absolute/path" else I change root's account with a * in place of the /absolute/path. Based on you statement, I just went to a buster install and typed "sudo synaptic", and it worked on an xfce4 system, so that was silently fixed, but I had to use -E on wheezy,jessie,and stretch.

And maybe I just found another oddity. The /root directory is empty. I thought it would have at least a copy of skel in it. Is that a product of using a no root login but sudo style?