Global options for RStudio

We install RStudio for our users to run interactively on our HPC clusters, via remote sessions, either via X forwarding or remote desktop like FastX or TurboVNC. The hardware OpenGL mostly does not work in these situations, so, we want to make the desktop.renderingEngine=software a global option, that is, make it valid for all launches of RStudio regardless of what an user has in their ~/.config/RStudio/desktop.info. By experimentation I found that setting the RSTUDIO_CHROMIUM_ARGUMENTS="--disable-gpu" by itself does not fix the OpenGL launch problems.

Is there a global configuration file where we could put this setting? I have been searching around and can't find any information about that.

Thanks,
Martin

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Great question, we need to document this. For Linux you should be able to set a system-wide value for this by creating:

/etc/xdg/RStudio/desktop.ini

containing:

[General]
desktop.renderingEngine=software

Make sure the file is readable by all users. One catch, users can still change the setting and their per-user setting will override this system-wide setting.

Gory details:

This particular setting is persisted via the Qt framework's QSettings class, with the IniFormat on Linux and Windows (and the binary format on Mac). The location of this system-wide file is based on the XDG_CONFIG_DIRS environment variable (the default value being /etc/xdg).

Even more details here: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qsettings.html

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Great, thanks Gary, that did the trick. I appended the XDG_CONFIG_DIR with a custom globally mounted directory that has the RStudio/desktop.ini, as I don't have control over /etc, and RStudio launches.

I think it'd be useful if you could add this info to your OpenGL problems page, https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017886674-Troubleshooting-RStudio-Rendering-Errors

MC

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