Bug#762757: gdm3: please don't depend on gnome-shell

[Simon McVittie]

On 29/09/14 02:29, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> Either you have the concept of a display manager, which should be then
> pretty agnostic towards the desktop environment used... and especially
> it shouldn't be what it is just expected to start.
> Or you don't have a DM and (in the case of GNOME) there should be just
> gnomeshell.

To be clear, gdm can start any desktop environment as the user session
that gets started under your uid, either GNOME Shell or not. Its hard
dependency on gnome-shell is because the "greeter" - the UI that is run
under uid Debian-gdm when you are not logged in, into which you enter
your username and password - consists of gnome-shell running in a
special mode.

If you use GNOME, that means that the greeter and the actual user
session are consistent, in terms of appearance/UI conventions, the
accessibility features available and how you activate them, and so on.
If you don't use GNOME, the greeter being consistent with an environment
you don't use is probably of little value to you, which is why I
suggested considering alternative *dm implementations.

    S