Bug#1142713: gnome-shell: logout button not displayed in quick menu on single-user host

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tags -1 + upstream
Control: forwarded -1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/work_items/378

On Fri, 24 Jul 2026 at 13:48:22 +0100, James Addison wrote:
>it seems that GNOME upstream has made some changes that cause
>the session logout button not to be displayed by default on single-user host
>systems.

This is working as designed (by upstream). There is upstream discussion 
about whether that design is the most appropriate or not, but at the 
moment it seems to be working as expected.

Debian could diverge from that design choice, but each point of 
divergence has a cost, so it should be a considered/consensus thing 
rather than something we rush into.

It seems that in the past this behaviour might have been hidden by bugs 
that meant the "Log Out" button was shown when it was not meant to be, 
or by the existence of more than one selectable session (Wayland and 
X11) which is one of the scenarios where upstream *did* intend the 
button to be shown.

>There is a GNOME setting named 'org.gnome.shell always-show-log-out' that can
>be set to 'true' to override this; I have not configured that yet.

My understanding is that this is the official way to force the "Log Out" 
button to be shown.

     smcv