Hi folks. I have trouble in my fedora 41 installation. I already post a topic on the fedora discourse. But I wan’t to know the exact reason why the gdm service will fail with the message Gdm: GdmSession: no session desktop files installed, aborting. where the gdm services look for these session files ?
on the journal messages there is another message (gnome-shell) crashed in drisw_init_screen()
This looks like the gnome-shell instance launched by gdm is failing to start due to driver issues. The crash happens in the Mesa software renderer, which normally shouldn’t even be used.
Maybe that was a Wayland instance (though I’m not entirely sure how DRI would get used there) and gdm is now trying to fall back to X11 and your distro only has Wayland sessions installed by default? I think there was a change in Fedora 41 to drop X11 sessions from the default install.
As a workaround to get the X11 fallback working again try installing gnome-session-xsession, but that won’t solve the driver issue, which seems like the actual problem here.
oh this make sense, there is not files on the /usr/share/xsession. I will try to install that package.
but in this case the gdm should load a default session instead of breaking. I don’t know nothing about these session files. but breaking for missing configuration file is bad.
If there is not session the program must load a default one. is it reasonable ?
Those are the default sessions
I mean, why the default session is in another package. if only text so if nothing is found, just use a hard coded ones.
Because the actual binary that the session launches is from another package.
Hardcoding something like “if there are no sessions, assume a session named “GNOME” that launches the “gnome-session” binary” won’t help you if said binary is missing.
mmm I understand, the desktop file is text but it will call a the binary.
But will be bad for the gdm base package to include a basic session binary ? this to improve the user experience in this cases.
Since we are talking about the fallback X11 session for when the default Wayland session is not working, this would only work if an X server is installed. Now you would have to include some fallback X server with some fallback drivers all stuffed in the gdm package if you don’t want any external dependencies outside of gdm…
yeah that don’t make any sense. So why the gdm is not loading the sessions on the wayland dir. ? I have on the /usr/share/wayland-sessions
where I need to configure that the loading must be from the wayland dir ?
Those directories are used by default on systems where Wayland is supported. But it seems on your system there are graphics driver issues which might be causing this to fail.