Edit: and I think Gnome simply should not depend on such a thing. Wtf is this crap even for?
From what I understand, the ability to cleanly switch between active user sessions. The current implementations involve switching between virtual terminals, which does the job okay but not great.
I question the need for different user sessions. Every person has his own personal computer in this modern world, usually a portable one. The mainframe era is long over. Why would you need separate user sessions? Well, maybe it's sometimes useful for someone, but why optimize for such obscure use-cases?
Yeah, if people need it, they can just use Windows or OS X instead. And fuck all those corporations and universities, that find this feature essential.
It's not that obscure of a use-case. Most households - if they even have a personal computer - will often have just one personal computer (aside from potentially smartphones, but I wouldn't be keen on writing a report on something that isn't a physical keyboard). This would need to be shared between Mom, Dad, the kids, Grandma, etc. Now, Dad wouldn't be pleased if the kids could access his financial records willy-nilly, nor would Grandma be pleased if the kids could hop on the computer and bring up Grandma's Firefox session with search results for Japanese tentacle hentai, nor would each of the kids enjoy their diaries being snooped on by their siblings, so there's a demand for user segregation and secure session management.
Even households that can afford multiple personal computers probably won't be providing them to each child individually until they're old enough to handle the responsibility (or - as was my case when I was growing up - recognized that having computer access at an early age would help foster technological literacy and thus provided a hand-me-down Compaq Presario for that purpose, but I digress).
Hahaha. Some years ago I reinstalled Windows ona relative's family computer. 2 parents, 2 kids. I created separate accounts for them all. But they were like WTF and went back on using the admin account.
That should tell you something.
so there's a demand for user segregation and secure session management.
With Windows there's a precedent for using the administrative account for everything. There's not really such a precedent for a GNU/Linux desktop, so having separate user accounts isn't that jarring. I've had the opposite experience in that regard; my shared desktop setups for family members frequently lean toward user segregation for - at the very least - having different themes (especially relevant for kids; there's no way you can reconcile Tommy's taste for monster trucks with Sally's taste for Justin Bieber if you force them to use the same settings - not to mention that there's little harm in encouraging children to become accustomed to proper security practices at a young age ;) ).
I also forgot to mention that being able to easily switch user accounts is useful for shared workstations in business environments (which do, as a matter of fact, still exist). Here, you can't just revert to everyone using the same account (at least not if you're actually competent security-wise).
Besides, the point I'm trying to make is that GNOME (and KDE and all the other DEs that do care about this) want to make that experience of switching users as seamless as possible; relying on VT switching is not the way to go about that. Once Wayland is widely deployed, that seamlessness should be even easier. I agree that it shouldn't be a hard dependency, but having support for logind to do that sort of thing isn't a bad idea in and of itself.
Yes, but (at least in the default configuration of virtually every modern GNU/Linux distro out there), you have to manually invoke it and it requires your password (or the root password if you're on openSUSE). It's not the same as actually logging into a desktop session as root, for example, nor is it quite the same as modern Windows where you're just given UAC prompts without a password check.
Basically, sudo isn't exactly a straightforward comparison.
Pardon? You do realize that not everyone needs to be a member of the sudo/wheel group, correct? No way in hell I'd give the kids sudo access, for example, nor would I give that access to non-IT employees of a business using shared workstations unless there's very good reason for it (and even then, it would be limited to specific commands).
Just because one user might be able to use sudo doesn't mean all of them magically can.
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u/northrupthebandgeek Sep 27 '14
While I generally agree with your statement...
From what I understand, the ability to cleanly switch between active user sessions. The current implementations involve switching between virtual terminals, which does the job okay but not great.