multiple local X logins by same user

[Matthew Woehlke]

Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 8:38 PM, Matthew Woehlke
> <mw_triad at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>>
>> (Incidentally, Firefox drives me nuts not letting me run it on my local
>> login and via 'ssh -X' from a remote machine. Some apps are even worse
>> behaved than not coping with two full local X sessions as to go so far as to
>> not permit multiple instances to be run /at all/.)
> 
> Basically every nontrivial app doesn't support it, because it's just
> too crazy. 

Erm? Every app that supports running two simultaneous independent 
instances (which is to say, 90% or more of all non-trivial apps) won't 
even notice they aren't in the same X session. It's only "crazy" for 
apps that go ridiculously out of their way to make sure there is only 
ever one instance running on a machine. In fact, *other* than Firefox I 
can't think of a single program that has this problem.

> One could spend an entire lifespan trying to figure out
> "Ok, what if I do *this*?".  If you want to access your Firefox
> instance remotely, use vino or one of the other systems that lets you
> access your existing session.

I don't *want* to access my existing session. I want to start a second, 
completely independent session^1. Firefox is nearly the only program I 
can think of that doesn't let me do this.

(^1 I'll admit that I'd prefer one that won't hose state information 
when I run it, which I suppose is the problem we were talking about. 
Nevertheless, KDE applications don't seem to have a problem here, so 
trying to argue that it's "hard" is obviously just an excuse. There's 
all sorts of Free and proprietary software I could list that can run 
independent instances without hosing their state. Usually the 
last-running instance clobbers the state left by any others, which, 
while perhaps not ideal, is certainly "good enough" in many cases^2.)

(^2 I will grant that "last state wins" may be unacceptable for things 
like web browser history, which should be not only lossless but possibly 
shared, but there are already good solutions for that (usually called 
"databases"), and Firefox *is* using SQL these days...)

-- 
Matthew
I was recently amused by issuing 'rm -rf $KDEDIR'... from Konsole, while 
in a KDE session. And nothing bad happened whatsoever. Try THAT on 
Windows :-D.