Bug#755140: Fails to shutdown or logout without gnome-shell

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello Joachim Breitner!

Your problem with quitting the session is likely because nothing is
listening on the DBus API called by gnome-session (if you're not running
gnome-shell).

Upstream is working on making gnome components not rely on X (to support
running on top of Wayland instead).

I've also heard that gnome 3.8 was the last upstream release supporting
the fallback session. (Likely because everybody seems to prefer forking
over actually helping keeping it alive.)

This commit was included in gnome-shell 3.10 which is relevant
to your problem:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-session/commit/gnome-session/gsm-manager.c?id=705699b2799a3434d1a8f35c9a92868a5057f73e

I guess you have two options here....

short term it might work to revert the above commit for you, but I think
that will become increasingly hard to maintain.

better solution would be to implement something to listen to the correct
set of DBus API to show the poweroff/reboot/logout dialog depending
on which component you think should be in charge of that graphical
details.

If you're interested in helping out maintaining the fallback session
that help is very welcome. Please visit #debian-gnome on irc.debian.org.

Hope there hints helps you find a solution.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson