Yeah, difference in $PATH between shell and DE on linux is a reoccurring problem... The worst thing is that, at least as far as I know, there's now single standard place to define PATH which works for both!

I don't think we can provide any better diagnostics for this problem on our side, but the docs need clarification

having ~/.profile setting the $PATH

I think ~/.profile is what is executed by non-graphical shell and ~/.xprofile is executed by graphical login manager. I think I had some success in the past by adding source ./.profile line to my ~/.xprofile

You can also try putting PATH DEFAULT=${PATH}:@{HOME}/.cargo/bin in ~/.pam_environment.

Thank you for the suggestions!

• ~/.xprofile didn't work for me
• haven't tried the PAM stuff because it appears that it's not shipped with Solus

What did work in the end though is creating /etc/profile.d/cargo.sh with this line:

export PATH=$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH

Nb. for anyone from the future there's one issue with the .pam_environment approach. On some distros (Arch?), it prevents /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin from being added to PATH, so non-interactive ssh and scp stop working.

This seems to work, with some caveats about what you expect to find in PATH:

PATH DEFAULT=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:@{HOME}/.cargo/bin:@{HOME}/.local/bin