GUADEC 2019 - Benjamin Berg, Iain Lane - Managing GNOME Sessions with Systemd

Since the dawn of time, gnome-session has been the venerable session manager the GNOME desktop. It is responsible for starting the display manager, auto-starting applications, providing a session management API over D-Bus, and much more. Nowadays we can do better. We’ve had systemd around and capable of managing user sessions as well as system services for some time now. It offers us the possibility of providing more advanced session management capabilities. With systemd it becomes possible to start things