Fedora 19, Gnome 3, and Session Management

[Gene Czarcinski]

When I first updated to Fedora 19 I got a bit of a surprise.  I have 
used a number of different desktops of the years but have settled on 
gnome.  This included changing over to Gnome 3 and the gnome-shell when 
it became available.  In previous years I had used session management 
and the capabilities to save running applications at logout (or as a 
special session save) to be restarted at login.  I used this "session 
restore" to start all of the applications that I wanted running.  Many 
of these applications were gnome-terminal windows coming up on different 
directories.

So, with Fedora 19, I was surprised when no gnome-terminals restarted.  
I little investigation revealed that none were restarted because the 
session information was not saved even if the 
gnome-session-properties.option was enabled.  This saving and restart 
did work on Fedora 18 where gnome-terminal-3.6.1 was installed but not 
Fedora 19 with gnome-terminal-3.8.4.  Doing some research into the 
commits in the gnome-terminal git, I found that the eggSMClient support 
was removed in December 2011 and GtkApplication was installed in March 
2012.  This second part is important because, with gtk 3.4, gtk supports 
logout notification and negotiation similar to EggSMClient --
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.7/gtk-migrating-smclient-GtkApplication.html 


However, it appears that Gnome 3 applications which include at least 
gnome-terminal and gedit are NOT supporting saving the session at 
logout.  But, I cannot find any statement that this specific decision 
has been made.  There is an old gnome bugzilla "discussion" 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79285 and a new low priority rfe
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704676 but I have come the 
the conclusion that perhaps the correct solution is to NOT save the 
session.

My "new" thinking is to use gnome-session to define some new autostart 
applications for the applications I want running at login time.

For applications such as thunderbird and firefox, I can use 
gnome-shell-extension-auto-move-windows to place those applications on 
specific workspaces/desktops.  For the mutiple gnome-terminal windows I 
want started, I can use a combination of the --geometry=COLxROW+X+Y and 
execution of "wmctrl -s <n>" to place a gnome-terminal window on a 
specific desktop.  There might be a better way to specify the desktop 
for an application but I do not know what that might be.

Gene