If you run mc on a machine where the user has been started with HOME=/ (due to normal /home mount issue), then mc fails to start with: (mc:7166): Glib-WARNING **: GError set over the top of a previous GError or uninitialized memory. This indicates a bug in someone's code. You must ensure an error is NULL before it's set. The overwriting error message was: Cannot create /home/wookey/.cache/mc directory (mc:7166): Glib-WARNING **: GError set over the top of a previous GError or uninitialized memory. This indicates a bug in someone's code. You must ensure an error is NULL before it's set. The overwriting error message was: Cannot create /home/wookey/.local/share/mc directory Failed to run: Cannot create /home/wookey/.config/mc directory Ideally it would manage to start without these config directories, but even if that's not possible I suspect that these glib warnings are indicative of code doing the wrong thing.