Tue 08 May 2012 | tags: accountservice, accountsservice, dbus, Gnome3, Linux, simplicity, unix, -- (permalink)

Today I had the joy of trying to change a users desktop environment from Gnome, to Cinnamon, via ssh. At first I thought it would be easy, change the default desktop environment in lightdm.conf and restart. Fail. Ok, so where is a users desktop environment preference stored? .dmrc, or at least I thought so. I even logged in with a brand new user and confirmed that it saved the users desktop preference in \~/.dmrc. Except, if I changed .dmrc for a user, it just got overwritten with the old contents at their next automatic login. (Remember, ssh, so can't use the gui to change what was selected in the lightdm login screen).
Wha?!!? Surely not a dconf/gconf setting somewhere. Search search search. Still no luck. Eventually I discover a service called "AccountsService" or something along that name. It stores the users ".dmrc" contents in /var/lib/AccountsService/users/ with a file for each user, which believe it or not, can't be changed by the user! Arg! (And I believe you need to kill accountsservice to be able to change the contents of the file and have it actually honored, I tried just changing it, but ended up changing it then rebooting to get it to work)

This is stupidity! Have a daemon, that one of it's tasks is to tell the "display manager" what the users preferred desktop environment preference is, that stores it in a place the user can't change, without talking to the daemon! Oh, and write the contents of that file out to .dmrc at login, but don't bother reading from that file.

Doing some more digging, AccountService is for querying and manipulating user account information via D-Bus, essentially replacing the useradd, usermod and userdel commands. I can't find a "homepage" for it, the homepage listed is it's source code repo. (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/)  (NB: Some more digging finds this http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/AccountsService as the homepage)
I personally don't mind D-Bus, it services its purposes, but here is an instance where it looks like someone has gone to the trouble of writing a piece of code, to complicate some that use to be a simple stat/open of a file, that the user was in total control of.

For the record, lightdm will work without AccountsService, and I believe then it will honor \~/.dmrc
Also, accountsservice isn't in Debian stable, but is in Debian testing, and gdm3 and gnome depend on it. (So in other words Gnome3 depends on it)

I just don't understand why we need to reinvent the wheel, take something that is so simple (and fits in the Unix "philosophies" of everything is a file, and that file formats should be simple text based) and turn it into something that user no longer has control over, for something that sets their preference!

Read [http://blog.ngas.ch/archives/2011/12/13/the_destructive_desktop__mdash_linux_in_trouble/index.html][]for some more thoughts on dbus.

http://blog.ngas.ch/archives/2011/12/13/the_destructive_desktop__mdash_linux_in_trouble/index.html%20