Bug#776746: gnome-session: GNOME crashes during a remote desktop access

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 10 Mar 2015 at 04:32:39 +0000, GGaotx wrote:
> But if it's considered as GNOME's bug, probably it 
> should be patched to make GNOME 3 support non-compositing 
> environment

GNOME Shell, via its use of Mutter code for window management, requires
the Composite extension. This is not a feature that can be turned on or
off; Mutter's design relies on the ability to act as a compositing manager,
and it has no support for not doing so (just like Compiz and Unity,
and unlike traditional "stacking window managers" like Metacity).

The full GNOME environment as used by the GNOME and GNOME Classic
session types, in turn, requires GNOME Shell. If you want something
that superficially resembles GNOME but does not use GNOME Shell,
that's exactly GNOME Flashback, which is now packaged separately.

If your X server does not meet the requirements to run GNOME Shell,
then your only option is to use something that is not the full GNOME
environment, such as GNOME Flashback (which uses Metacity),
OpenBox's "GNOME/Openbox" session (which uses Openbox), or one of the
various GNOME forks like MATE.

I do not consider "requires modern X server features" to be a GNOME bug,
and neither do its upstream developers.

    S