Title: Desktop profile switching USE default to elogind Author: Andreas Sturmlechner Posted: 2020-04-14 Revision: 1 News-Item-Format: 2.0 Display-If-Installed: sys-auth/consolekit Modern desktop environments make use of PAM session tracking for users, login sessions and seats. [1] The most user-visible part of that is device and file permissions management and reboot/shutdown handling without superuser rights. Users with systemd can stop reading here and continue with their daily routine. ConsoleKit2 is unmaintained upstream for more than two years [2]. There are many longstanding bugs and papercuts with consumers that aren't being fixed, not least because these code paths receive very little testing. Enter the elogind project [3], which is a standalone logind implementation based on systemd code, currently maintained by a fellow Gentoo user. We have had sys-auth/elogind available in Gentoo since the beginning of 2017, and meanwhile it has gained support [4] in KDE Plasma, Gnome [5], Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce, as well as most other former consolekit consumers. Consequently, the desktop profile is switching away from consolekit to elogind. Users of sys-auth/consolekit who selected a different profile should consider doing the same. A guide is available [6]. Migration is easy, but any existing consolekit session will be broken, and elogind will only begin to work on relogin. Rely either on the profile, or set USE="elogind -consolekit" in make.conf yourself. Make sure there is no consolekit debris in /etc/portage/package.use: # grep -R consolekit /etc/portage/package.use Rebuild all affected consumers and remove sys-auth/consolekit: # emerge --ask --changed-use --deep @world # emerge --depclean consolekit Optional, but recommended in case of trouble such as missing reboot/shutdown capabilities in the display manager: # rc-update add elogind boot For users of ~/.xinitrc instead of one of the supported DMs, do not forget to update accordingly (ck-launch-session is gone without replacement). PS: Subsequently, this will lead to the last-riting of sys-power/pm-utils [7] which is dead even longer than the original ConsoleKit(1) project. KDE Plasma users sticking with sys-auth/consolekit are then going to lose suspend from GUI without superuser rights. [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ConsoleKit [2] https://github.com/ConsoleKit2/ConsoleKit2 [3] https://github.com/elogind/elogind/blob/master/README.md [4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=elogind-support [5] https://blogs.gentoo.org/leio/2019/03/26/gnome-3-30/ [6] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Elogind [7] https://bugs.gentoo.org/659616