xfce does not remember saved sessions on Fedora 20

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 12/13/2013 05:48 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Dec 2013 17:04:01 +0100
> Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>
>> On 12/13/2013 04:09 PM, nonamedotc wrote:
>>> I believe this happened before recently - XFCE does not remember
>>> sessions anymore. I tried clearing the ~/.cache/sessions/* and
>>> restarting the system - this does not affect the behavior in any
>>> way.
>>>
>>> Is anyone else seeing this?
>> Yes, I am. Both under F19 and F20!
>>
>>> How can I troubleshoot this and what information should I provide
>>> for getting to the root of this?
>> I have no idea. I've been playing with various of the "usual
>> suspects", which used to work in the past, but no success on F19/20
>> so far.
>
> Odd. I do not see this here (with rawhide), nor have I gotten any bugs
> on it. ;(
>
> So, can you folks pinpoint about when it started doing that?
> (perhaps it's an update that caused it?)
Unfortunately, no.

All I can say, *automatic session* saving already was flakey during 
f17/f18, but since having upgraded to f19 it almost never works.
Also, the symptoms I am observing seem not consistent and 
non-systematic/non-deterministic.

I usually work with 6 virtual workspaces and use "automatic session 
saving", typically with many terminals (gnome-terminal and 
xfce-terminal) and very few GUI apps (e.g. thunderbird, firefox, 
nautilus, vlc) spread across these virtual workspaces.
Also, I often "su" to other accounts in some of these terminals and 
often ssh'ed into other machines inside of these terminals. Furthermore, 
I am using nfs/yp/automounted homes.

When re-loggin in,
- sometimes, *all* "saved apps" appear on virtual "workspace 1", 
plastered on top of each other.
- sometimes, I end up with an empty workspace.
- sometimes, some GUI-apps seem to be restored, but the terminals aren't.
- on one machine

My guess would, be there are several issues interacting, with xfce only 
being one part of the game. SELinux (I have been observing sealerts 
referring to /home/<user> with homes being shared between f19 and f20), 
systemd and something related to the GPU (kernel or x-server) definitely 
are involved on occasion.


> If you pull up prefs-> sessions and startup what do you have checked
> there?

X Automatically save session on logout
X Prompt on logout

In ->Advanced:
X Launch Gnome Services

Everything else is unchecked.

[That's part of what I was referring to as "usual suspects" - I have 
been playing with these settings, but ... no deterministic improvements, 
so far.]

> If you go to the "Session" tab and click 'save session' does the
> ~/.cache/session* files get updated?
Yes, it does.

Ralf