.Xresources file ignored on OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 with GNOME

Question

I have written an .Xresources file with xterm settings, and it is not loaded when user logs in: the xterm has the ugly default settings when launched. This happens on a VirtualBox VM running OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 with Gnome and multimedia patterns installed. Except for VirtualBox Guest Additions, kernel-devel and git, it is a fresh install "as shipped".

The settings are correctly loaded after I run

xrdb -merge .Xresource

and relaunch xterm

Adding the above command to .xinitrc file, created based on template from OpenSUSE, has no effect. I've tried to add xclock & to .xinitrc, but no clock appears on login. So I guess .xinitrc is ignored.

The bizarre detail is that I run the said VM on another OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 physical machine, with exactly same OS installation, and there my .Xresources file is loaded! In fact, the VM was intentionally created as similar to the PM as possible for experimenting and testing.

The PM has NVIDIA card, and CUDA packages are installed. I have run the same Ansible playbook against the VM that I used to configure PM to see if CUDA packages make any difference, but no - .Xresources still ignored.

So, what am I missing here? How to get Xterm configured persistently? I'd be grateful if someone could point me to the relevant documentation, if it exists.

Answer 1

Solved it next morning after posting on Superuser - as usual :).

Gnome uses Wayland by default, which ignores the X11 dot files. But there is a notable exception - with NVIDIA drivers, the default is X11-based Gnome "due to instability", according to this Debian page:

https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland#GNOME

To switch to X11-Gnome, click the cogwheel icon before entering password when logging in, and select "Gnome on Xorg". If you've configured automatic login, you won't see any, of course.

To test which kind of session you are running,

~> echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11