#960329 lightdm: Error getting user list from org.freedesktop.Accounts

Package:
lightdm
Source:
lightdm
Description:
simple display manager
Submitter:
Allan Wind
Date:
2025-08-17 17:49:01 UTC
Severity:
minor
Tags:
#960329#5
Date:
2020-05-11 20:01:01 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

accountsservice was using a lot of CPU on my system from time to
time, so I purged it.  lightdm does not depend on accountsservice
(like gdm3), but report errors if the package is not installed:

2020-05-11T19:01:03.247+00:00 vent lightdm[639]: Error getting user list from org.freedesktop.Accounts: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Accounts was not provided by any .service files
2020-05-11T19:01:06.338+00:00 vent lightdm[746]: Error getting user list from org.freedesktop.Accounts: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Accounts was not provided by any .service files
2020-05-11T19:01:11.217+00:00 vent lightdm[1069]: Error getting user list from org.freedesktop.Accounts: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Accounts was not provided by any .service files

I don't see anything in the lightdm configuration files that tells
me how to disable the use of accountsservice to placate the error.  There
probably should be.  I don't have a use for .dmrc (re #690898) but
presumably that would be a work-around.


/Allan
#960329#10
Date:
2021-03-30 03:07:20 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

After insatlling lightdm by
apt-get --install-recommends install task-xfce-desktop/sid task-desktop/sid,
the bug #960329 still persists.

Installing the package accountsservice, and systemctl restart lightdm
does not fix this symptom.

Because of this bug, lightdm keeps failing to start,
and I can make no interaction with keyboard and display
(ssh is OK), so I increase the severity to grave.
The system is Debian bullseye arm64 running on the Raspberry Pi 4B.
All packages are pure Debian.

I hope this issue is fixed before the official Bullseye release.

Best regards, Ryutaroh Matsumoto
#960329#19
Date:
2021-03-30 03:14:52 UTC
From:
To:
I now think that failure of the startup of lightdm is
caused by something other than lightdm.
I keep investigating and lower the severity
until I get a clear picture of the symptom.

Best regards, Ryutaroh
#960329#26
Date:
2021-03-30 03:57:17 UTC
From:
To:
Startup failure of lightdm was caused by
GDM_BACKEND=wayland environment variable...

Installing accountsservice removes the error message
reported in #960329.
accountsservice is suggested by lightdm.
Upgrading "suggest" to "recommend" might be a good idea...

Sorry for disturbing... Ryutaroh