[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1018880: dbus-user-session: GNOME applications such as evince and nautilus start with a 25-second delay via ssh

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 01 Sep 2022 at 12:22:28 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> (not sure about the right package)

I'm not sure this is dbus-user-session, but I'll leave it there for now.

> I first noticed that when I connect by ssh, evince is very slow to
> start. A "strace -f -ttt evince" shows a 15-second timeout followed
> by a 10-second timeout, thus a 25-second delay, before the window
> appears.

Please describe your exact scenario in more detail. For instance, are you
already logged in as the same user on a graphical console, or on a tty,
or in some other way? If yes, what desktop environment, display manager,
etc. are in use? Or are you assembling your own graphical environment from
individual components such as startx?

If you're expecting graphical applications to work "when I connect by
ssh", then presumably you're doing *something* that you're not saying,
either X11-over-ssh forwarding or a separate X11 session or a separate
Wayland session - otherwise these applications would have nowhere to
display their windows.

It might help to try to reproduce a minimal version of the same problem
in a virtual machine, perhaps starting from one of the Debian Live images.

> A comment at
> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/676410/evince-is-slow-to-open
> based on information from https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=224787
> (ssh is actually not involved at these URLs) says to run
> 
>   dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd \
>     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DISPLAY XAUTHORITY

This might help, or it might make things worse, depending where you run
it from and under what circumstances. I cannot know without more detail
of what scenario you are trying to fix.

In a Debian X11 environment, /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20dbus_xdg-runtime is
meant to do something similar for you, so if you are in an X11 environment
where that's not working, either something has gone wrong somewhere or
your X11 environment is not participating in Debian's system-integration
mechanisms.

    smcv