Installation first run problem - Unable to write program user data.

[slodge]

I started to write this as a bug report... but thought I should try here in discussions first...

Anyone got any idea why a clean positron install would fail on my new Mac?

Thanks

Stuart

---

System details:

Positron and OS details:

MacOS - a fairly new, clean Macbook Air M4 512/24 - running MacOS 'Version 15.6 (24G84)'

Brand new install of R - R-4.5.2-arm64
Brand new install of positron 2025.11-0-235 arm64 (have also now tried with 10.1-4)

Session details:

Describe the issue:

Positron won't start - error was "A system error occurred (EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/Users/--my user name--/.local/state')"

The folder .local/state doesn't exist. Looking at the permissions on .local shows that its owned by root with permissions drwxr-xr-x@:

Steps to reproduce the issue:

AFAIK it's a new fairly "clean" laptop and there's the first time I'm trying a positron installation. There is already an existing VSCode install. There is no RStudio install.

The positron installation instructions on posit.co just say "Download the installer for your operating system from the button below and follow the standard installation process for your platform." - so all I've done is:

• download the dmg,
• then drag the positron icon over to the Applications folder...

Was there some other step? Maybe there's something else going on that means my "clean" new macbook air isn't as clean as I thought it was...

Expected or desired behavior:

Desired: positron starts...

Were there any error messages in the UI, Output panel, or Developer Tools console?

I've tried using https://positron.posit.co/troubleshooting.html to see if I can spot any additional error logs, but didn't see anything.

I did try a clean install - using rm -rf ~/.positron and rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Positron, but nothing seemed to help. I can start chmod some folder permissions if needed, but thought I'd ask here first... also hoping it might help future explorers...

There's some similarity to #9048 - although that is a Windows 10 discussion.

[timtmok]

@slodge It's possible that you ran something else with elevated privileges that created .local as root. It should be owned by the user. Once you change the ownership to your user, Positron will be able to write its data to that location.

[slodge]

Looking at the timestamps, the .local folder has the same created time as some of my zsh configuration. It's possible I ran some strange scripts to get this setup... although I followed fairly generic instructions at the time.

I'll do some chmod'ing and get on with some work 👍

I'll leave it up to the team to work out if it would useful to log this as an issue. Obviously from where I'm standing this issue has happened 100% of the time ... but I guess if no-one else has reported this, then it's not a very common error :)

[juliasilge]

We'll keep an eye out for similar reports, @slodge. Thank you for sharing what you ran into!