Here is a video of what is going wrong

[jonahgraham]

As this relates to a conversation on https://chat.eclipse.org/#/room/#eclipse-ide-general:matrix.eclipse.org from today.

This issue is so I could put this video somewhere

Screencast.From.2025-05-07.15-45-14.mp4

This video shows running a small program:

	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, InterruptedException {
		System.out.println(System.getenv("GDK_BACKEND"));
	}

First we run it with a random environment variable set and note that GDK_BACKEND is null.

Then we remove the variable from the launch configuration and GDK_BACKEND is now x11

[fedejeanne]

Hm, you might be onto something here, Jonah.

DISCLAIMER: tested on Windows

I tried a variation of your snippet with and without extra environment variables and I see an odd difference between them

On the left you see the output without the extra variable and on the right the output with the extra variable

I can't explain how does a simple meaningless variable cause these differences in the overall system environment.

Here's the snippet btw

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.TreeMap;

public class Snippet {
	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, InterruptedException {
		for (var e : new TreeMap<>(System.getProperties()).entrySet()) {
			System.out.println(e);
		}
	}
}

And here is the extra variable, which btw doesn't show up at all in the output