I wanted to increase privacy on my home directory so I chmod -R 750 /home/Me/. After doing so my desktop fonts went from nice smooth font's to fonts with rough edges , panels with thick boarders and theme specific icons disappear to default ones.

My guess was that some program no longer had access to a needed file. So I played with a number of permission combinations and found that chmod -R 771 brought me back to normal.

The issue is that I don't want that on my data. (want 750) but when I chmod all but the data to 771 and data at 750 I have the issue.

The other strange thing is now the same issue is coming up intermittently without me changing permissions.

Ghost in the machine..... .... ignorance.....

Maybe try...
...the -c option is 'change'...as in 'play with them however'...the -f option is 'force'...as in 'do this anyway'. $Data means whatever data you want to have...use with discretion...possibly make certain you are the owner? Hope this helps

Thanks for the reply & help. It did the trick but I am not totally sure why.

I chmod -cRf 750 /home/me restarted X and no issue.


Could this be because I now "forced" the change where before I just did recursively ?

What would have stopped them before ? ( I used sudo )