I'm a certified dummy running Debian 10 with kernel 4.19.0-8-amd64 on a mid-2012 Macbook Pro. The box has xfce, MATE, and dwm on it, but this issue occurs when running all three. I use LightDM to log in and start X.

I've been trying to adjust the color scheme for X via a .Xresources file.

Pastebin here.

I realize the color choices are boneheaded, but I'll worry about editing that once I can pass it to the terminal programs. I've made double-sure that the arguments get passed to xrdb via my .xsessionrc. Running

xrdb -query

returns the settings specified by the .xsessionrc. -load and -merge for xrdb do not make a difference. It seems that X11 is, for some reason, not implementing the changes in xrdb.

echo $TERM

returns

xterm-256color

Other terminal emulators use the same default colorscheme. MATE still uses the theme that I set for it using the GUI. I am using bash as my shell. .bashrc and .profile are defaults.

I'm unsure they will actually be useful, but here are the .xsession-errors from each WM: MATE xfce dwm

Thank you for your time.