can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

difri84 · 2022-07-25 15:04:00

i use i3 and it's pretty much unusable for the rest of my family,

i would like to set up the login manager (in my case lightdm, but i'm willing to change) to login into a full DE when the user is not me and to login in i3 when it's me.
i know it's easy to specify which DE i want on every login but i would like my family to not worry about that, i would like them to just put user and password in and not risk to login in i3.

is it doable?

Last edited by difri84 (2022-07-25 15:04:25)

ewaller · 2022-07-25 15:10:50

IT is definitely doable. I don't know about lightdm, but gdm and sddm handle this well. This system has Plasma and Sway installed. sddm offers Plasma on Xorg, Plasma on Wayland, and Sway as options and remembers what one last used as the default.

difri84 · 2022-07-25 15:15:25

I didn't yet try to do it, lightdm remember the last session, i've always assumed it remembered the last session regardless of the user. At this moment i only have one user and one DE so i cannot try this, but it's good to know that even if it doenst work i could switch to gdm or sddm to achieve this!

Could someone confirm if lightdm remembers the login session per user intead on system level?

Last edited by difri84 (2022-07-25 15:17:08)

ngoonee · 2022-07-25 23:16:21

ewaller wrote:

IT is definitely doable. I don't know about lightdm, but gdm and sddm handle this well. This system has Plasma and Sway installed. sddm offers Plasma on Xorg, Plasma on Wayland, and Sway as options and remembers what one last used as the default.

I use sddm, but AFAICR it just remembers what was last used for every user. So for example if difri84 logged in to i3 and then shut down, on next boot anyone logging in would get i3.

difri what I would recommend instead is for everyone in your family to use Plasma, but in your own specific session you replace the WM with i3 (using KDE's mechanisms for replacing plasma with i3, its in our wiki). You get full i3 management, the added 'benefit' of the plug-and-play KDE staff for displays/thumb drives etc, and your family is not affected, they just get the normal full-fat KDE+kwin. I use this myself on our shared machine here actually.

Trilby · 2022-07-25 23:45:38

Or just let everyone log in to a tty and configure each user's .bash_profile to auto-start their preferred DE.

ngoonee · 2022-07-26 00:09:08

Trilby wrote:

Or just let everyone log in to a tty and configure each user's .bash_profile to auto-start their preferred DE.

Reasonable. Don't forget dbus-launch (IIRC).

seth · 2022-07-26 06:23:30

lightdm defaults to $HOME/.dmrc
xdm (can be prettier than the default. MUCH prettier - though that's not a very high bar) will not allow you to select a session at all, but execute ~/.xinitrc (a bit like Trilby's suggestion, but w/ a graphical login)

seth · 2022-07-26 06:25:13

ngoonee wrote:

Reasonable. Don't forget dbus-launch (IIRC).

PSA:
Don't forget to NOT use dbus lunch and see the last link below (the note about what to include in your GUI session startup) and possibly re-using the VT on the same wiki page.

qinohe · 2022-07-26 15:28:25

Have tried this with LightDM and even though the session in '/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf' was unset and set in ~/.dmrc it always defaulted to one WM an I was never able to open a second session.
Using the same ~/.dmrc but used with installed LXDM works flawless.
Able to open multiple sessions and starting the preferred WM set in ~/.dmrc from every user - my 2 cents;)

Besides that LightDM logged in to the user session just fine..

ngoonee · 2022-07-27 00:50:47

seth wrote:

ngoonee wrote:
Reasonable. Don't forget dbus-launch (IIRC).
PSA:
Don't forget to NOT use dbus lunch and see the last link below (the note about what to include in your GUI session startup) and possibly re-using the VT on the same wiki page.

Not sure if things have changed, but IIRC without dbus-launch pulseaudio behaves oddly at least. Maybe pipewire is better?

Trilby · 2022-07-27 01:24:56

ngoonee wrote:

Not sure if things have changed, but IIRC without dbus-launch pulseaudio behaves oddly at least.

They have changed. Pulseaudio and several other tools will require an active dbus session. This had formerly been (kinda') accomplished by using dbus-launch to start any graphical session. This is now instead handled by /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/50-systemd-user.sh which is included in any proper xinitrc (as noted in the link in seth's signature).

As a side note, I need to use pulseaudio on one of my systems, and I don't source that file or do anything specific to start dbus, and pulseaudio works fine. I don't know what to make of this other than a single anecdotal data point as I have no interest in learning pulse or dbus (personally I'd be happier with neither of them installed).

Last edited by Trilby (2022-07-27 01:27:46)

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#1 2022-07-25 15:04:00

can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#2 2022-07-25 15:10:50

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#3 2022-07-25 15:15:25

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#4 2022-07-25 23:16:21

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#5 2022-07-25 23:45:38

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#6 2022-07-26 00:09:08

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#7 2022-07-26 06:23:30

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#8 2022-07-26 06:25:13

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#9 2022-07-26 15:28:25

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#10 2022-07-27 00:50:47

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

#11 2022-07-27 01:24:56

Re: can i set up a specific desktop enviroment for a specific user?

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