A bit of off-topic

Posted Feb 3, 2015 8:43 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: Some unreliable predictions for 2015 by raven667
Parent article: Some unreliable predictions for 2015

I think Mathew missed it big time with this post. Firstly, LightDM is *still* Ubuntu's dm of choice (and working great, if you ask me). But more importantly, the main reason for GDM to start a full session is profoundly flawed. In fact, the idea that power management and accessibility belong to the user's session is flawed. And funnily, it's Mathew himself that gives the reason:

> Closing the lid of my laptop should suspend the system regardless of whether it's logged in or not.

Absolutely. That's why power policy should *never* be related to the user's desktop session.

A bit of off-topic

Posted Feb 3, 2015 15:55 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I agree this is off topic but power management does interact with the console and requires communication with whatever is driving the console output, power management changes depending on whether the keyboard is being used or a video is being played or other factors that the UI program knows about and there should be UI elements which allow the user present on the console to suspend or power off the device. There may be a backend daemon which coordinates these changes but they are driven by policy encoded with the console UI itself.

Once you need to have software running to interact with the console present user then you need a context to run that software in, having a user session dedicated to the login screen allows it to have the same protections as any user and make it less of a special case.

I dunno, makes sense to me anyway.