In a Horizon VDI non-persistent Windows 10 vm I can't stop the Whats New page from displaying each time a new virtual machine is created and Rstudio first start.
I have an R/R -.5.3/etc/Renviron.site file and have there put:
Both those are honored but not the whats new page. Doesn't matter if I put it in user .Renviron file, same result. The only way to stop it seems to be a file called whats-new-state.json that is created in the users roaming profile after first start, however we start it over and over again as first start.
The RSTUDIO_DISABLE_WHATS_NEW env var can't be set in ~.Renviron, that gets processed too late in the application startup. Showing "What's New" is done entirely in the Electron code that runs before the R session itself has been created, and it's the R session that processes .Renviron.
So, this particular variable must already be set before starting RStudio, e.g. in either user or system environment variables.
Also, I just opened a feature request (to myself) to add a user preference for this so there's a more obvious way to turn this off. Too late to get into the 2026.07 release, but will target 2026.08.