4 Dec 2005 jvic   » (Journeyer)

dm rant

We Linux users are so proud of our multitask/multiuser system. We love having a separate /home partition for user data, and we love that each user in the system has his own little space in the system.

We put up telecenters where lots of people are able to remotely connect to a machine, and they all share the same server as if there were actually many computers running.

Now, why is it that we can't simply do:

  • Lock the current session
  • and start a new session with a new user?

It does seem like it's so simple, doesn't it? MacOSX and WinXP have this figured out years ago, and we multitask/multiuser Linux people can't do it.

No, the gdm "Start new session" doesn't count because you actually can only execute that before you lock the current session. You can't do it if you've locked the session already. Which totally misses the point of it, IMHO.

And yes, there are hacks. But they're just that, hacks... each one of them i've tried has some kind of annoying usability problem.

Phew... after spending hours playing with gdm/kdm/xdm/mdkkdm to get this working, i had to put this out, sorry.

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