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

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2022-09-07 11:50:53 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Part of the root cause here is that xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is a systemd
> user-service that cannot work without either an X11 or Wayland display
> (its purpose is to show prompts when a sandboxed application wants to
> do something that needs your permission); but during X11 forwarding,
> no component is responsible for telling systemd --user where user-services
> can find your X11 display, so xdg-desktop-portal-gtk fails to start.
> 
> Because X11 forwarding isn't part of the integrated system involving
> x11-common, there's no good component to be responsible for that.
> A ssh login session probably should *not* be doing this automatically,
> because in your specific case (X11 forwarding with no local GUI),
> it would be beneficial to tell systemd --user about your DISPLAY, but
> in a more typical desktop use-case (local Wayland or X11), it would
> be harmful to do that (because it would make parts of the overall GUI
> unexpectedly pop up on the forwarded X11 display instead of locally,
> until the forwarded display disconnects, at which point those parts of
> the GUI would just not work at all).

I would expect this to be done dynamically (not at login time),
because the user may have several active X11 displays at the
same time: for instance, I have a personal machine at home and
another one at my lab, and whether I'm at home or at my lab,
I may want to start applications either locally or remotely. The
selected display should be the one from which the user started
the application (i.e. where the application window will appear).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)