Currently the gnome-settings-daemon background plugin does a fade operation between the login screen and the user session.  Looking at the code, this code is only used when nautilus is not already drawing the background.

While this is a neat feature, it does cause problems in some environments.  For example, if you are remote logging in via XDMCP over a slow high-latency network, the fade effect can be very slow and take well over 30 seconds, making the launch of the user session painful.

I worked with the nautilus maintainer to add a new configuration option to disable the fade feature.  This is useful for users who have this sort of problem, and also for sysadmins who manage servers where users tend to use XDMCP over high-latency networks where they would likely want to disable the fade feature as the system default.

Refer to nautilus bug 623174 to see the details of this change to nautilus.

gnome-settings-daemon 2.91.0 refers to and honors the nautilus GConf settings relating to how to draw the background, so it would be good if the plugin could also check this key and honor it as well.

One issue is that I believe nautilus has recently changed its configuration from GConf to GSettings, so I am guessing that the gnome-settings-daemon background plugin also needs to be updated to use the new nautilus GSettings configuration values instead of GConf.  So perhaps adding this new configuration option to avoid the fading effect can be done as part of that work?