Hi.

Is gnome-shell really needed for gdm to run?

I thought gdm was intended to also be a general purpose DM,
but people who use anything else, e.g. Cinnamon, than
gnome shell have to pull in the full dependency tree of it.


Cheers,
Chris.

Control: tags 762757 + wontfix

Yes. gdm's current user interface is just GNOME Shell running in a
special mode: the fallback non-Shell greeter (which was used by default
in Debian 7) was removed between 3.8 and 3.10. I suspect this should be
closed as "not a bug", but for now I'm just tagging it wontfix.

For non-GNOME environments, you might be better off with lightdm.

    S

Well one should probably leave it open and forward it upstream, since
this is quite clearly a design-error then.

Either you have the concept of a display manager, which should be then
pretty agnostic towards the desktop environment used... and especially
it shouldn't be what it is just expected to start.
Or you don't have a DM and (in the case of GNOME) there should be just
gnomeshell.


Cheers,
Chris.


btw: I also worry about about popcon numbers. I mean these are not
rarely used to "prove"/advertise someone's point or to "assist" decide
things in our countless discussions, be it about systemd[0] or about the
default desktop environment.
Now most people use gdm (IIRC comes even per default), so for that
reason nearly everyone will have gnomeshell installed, which in turn can
be used as (wrong) arguments in aforementioned discussion.


[0] I'm in favour of it, just miss some important things :(

To be clear, gdm can start any desktop environment as the user session
that gets started under your uid, either GNOME Shell or not. Its hard
dependency on gnome-shell is because the "greeter" - the UI that is run
under uid Debian-gdm when you are not logged in, into which you enter
your username and password - consists of gnome-shell running in a
special mode.

If you use GNOME, that means that the greeter and the actual user
session are consistent, in terms of appearance/UI conventions, the
accessibility features available and how you activate them, and so on.
If you don't use GNOME, the greeter being consistent with an environment
you don't use is probably of little value to you, which is why I
suggested considering alternative *dm implementations.

    S