Mate-terminal not respecting /etc/passwd sucks

Support & Help Requests
#1

I recently reinstalled Ubuntu MATE just to start fresh, because I kept on receiving issues post-update (I kinda goofed it still worked but figured why not?) and since I had /bin/zsh set as shell, as zsh didn't exist mate-terminal kept crashing.

There is no way to fix this inside of mate-terminal because mate-terminal keeps crashing.

Just figured I would let people know this. Previous behaviour was (like any other sane terminal emulator) to respect changes made in /etc/passwd, either edited by hand or via chsh. Not until recently did someone think getting rid of that was a great idea.

Insanity. Just insanity.

#2

Have you got references to the commits/issues that describe this problem?

Looking at mate-terminal's commit history, I couldn't really see any things directly referencing the "shell". It sounds like a bug rather then a developer's bad intent. :thinking:

#3

Yeah, it doesn't look deliberate. Get it into Launchpad if you haven't already, and hopefully it'll get sorted out before 20.04.

#4

Uh, yeah guys either I blew it up, or something was added into 1.22.1 recently because now I see an option to use "[U]se my shell" (as defined by /etc/passwd) rather than defining the shell manually.

This isn't an issue anymore.

Moved to U so it may hide.