User:Eliasp/Drafts/Plasma Workspace as systemd user-session

From KDE TechBase

Plasma Workspace as systemd user-session

Ultimate Goal

The ultimate goal of this project is, to make use of systemd's support for user-sessions wherever possible for running a Plasma Workspace. This support is to be implemented in a way which doesn't get in the way of legacy/cross-platform support, so running a Plasma Workspace without a systemd user-session underneath will still be possible.

What are the benefits?

  • Parallelized and faster startup of the Plasma Workspace after login
  • More finegrained control over running services
  • Increased stability by eliminating existing hacks in startkde, ksmserver, kdeinit, …
  • Cleaner definition of dependencies between Plasma Workspace components
  • Increased security

Resources

user-session units for Plasma Workspace

I created some initial user-session units for Plasma Workspace which can be found on GitHub.

Unsorted items

This is a collection of items, notes and other things which need to be taken care of. They need to be investigated and properly documented.

ksmserver

ksmserver does a lot of ugly (from systemd's perspective) things which need to be evaluated:

  • tries to start a WM in ksmserver/startup.cpp → launchWM which should be left to systemd
  • doesn't register itself as session leader via systemd-logind which breaks a lot of session related functionality. Documented in bug#335390