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If the aim is to replicate how Windows works, only the GUI shell would need to reload environment variables (i.e. the process that forks when you start programs using whatever the desktop's idiom is).

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This seems inconsistent behaviour to me. Some running processes reload the environment and others don't. Maybe in Windows they can get away with it, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

To be fair: The Windows way is kinda consistent: If the environment definition was changed, everyone gets a window message. It's just that no one but explorer.exe cares about that and reacts, as far as I'm aware (Raymond Chen had a recent article mentioning exactly this).

So, the OS tells everyone 'Hey, you totally could update your environment'. But your running instance of Skype or whatever just doesn't need to care.

Raymond Chen article for anyone that is interested: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/09/15/10641...

I think that reacting to system change is opt-in.

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