GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 684516
gdm-3.5.9x loses session selection UI after logout from gnome
Last modified: 2012-09-27 03:33:37 UTC
This is easily reproduced in Fedora 18 Alpha (also after updating to gnome-3.5.91 and 3.5.92). 1. install Fedora 18 Alpha with gnome and add another DE. 2. login to gnome from gdm observing session menu UI below password box 3. logout from gnome and start to login again, observe that session selection UI is gone Apparently this is caused by systemd (loginctl) still thinking that the the user is logged in due to remaining stray backend processes from the first gnome session: the libexec culprits being: tracker-miner-fs, deja-dup-monitor, and tracker-store. A workaround is # loginctl terminate-user <gnomeuser> # systemctl restart gdm or rebooting. ;) I think there have been stray process from gnome almost forever, so the regression is really mistaking those for a user session.
we ignore sessions that are in "closing" state, so this should already be fixed afaik. I'm surprised you're seeing issues with 3.5.9x
I see this too: 'closing' sessions still make the user appear as logged in in the greeter.
The bug in question was bug 677556
The problem here is that the decision to consider the user logged in is made in the gnome-shell greeter code, which relies on act_user_is_logged_in() for that. And act_user_is_logged_in() returns TRUE whenever logind has any sessions for the user listed - regardless whether these are non-graphical, or closing, or whatever.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55210 has an accountsservice patch to fix this.