There’s one issue with the migration to zsh for existing users. New builds won’t have this issue. After the packages update, default shell is switched from bash to zsh, the ZDOTDIR environment variable won’t be set yet. When opening a terminal before rebooting, the following surprise (violates principle of least surprise), complicated and confusing message (for most users)
This is the Z Shell configuration function for new users,
zsh-newuser-install.
You are seeing this message because you have no zsh startup files
(the files .zshenv, .zprofile, .zshrc, .zlogin in the directory
~). This function can help you with a few settings that should
make your use of the shell easier.
You can:
(q) Quit and do nothing. The function will be run again next time.
(0) Exit, creating the file ~/.zshrc containing just a comment.
That will prevent this function being run again.
(1) Continue to the main menu.
(2) Populate your ~/.zshrc with the configuration recommended
by the system administrator and exit (you will need to edit
the file by hand, if so desired).
--- Type one of the keys in parentheses ---
Users would certainly ask something like: Why does this happen? What should I configure?
Option A) Would creating an empty file /home/user/.zshrc be an acceptable solution?
if ! test -f /home/user/.zshrc ; then
sudo -u user touch /home/user/.zshrc || true
fi
Option B) Change default shell from bash to zsh only for new builds of Whonix but keep existing users on zsh for now? Then we could give users time to update, next time they update, they’ll already have ZDOTDIR environment variable and /etc/zsh/dist folder. Only users who don’t update for a for a long time would run into above issue.
Option A and B could in theory also be combined but not sure that’s good.