Setting Default Desktop Session for 1st time logins in lab environment

Desktop
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I’m trying to make the switch from KDE Plasma to GNOME3 in a lab environment with about 50 users for 15 servers running CentOS 7 using LDAP for authentication. I would like the ability to set the default desktop to be gnome-shell (rather than gnome-classic which is the CentOS default). It appears that gdm no longer obeys a .dmrc file in the user’s home directory, therefore placing that file in /etc/skel no longer does anything when pam_mkhomedir does its magic upon a user’s first login. Some reading on the web suggests that gdm now looks for a file in /var/lib/AccountsService/users/$LOGNAME which doesn’t exist in the server OS filesystem until after the new user first logs in. By now you see my conundrum…

Is there a way to change the default desktop for first-time logins globally?
Or better yet, let me set it in LDAP and have gdm read it from there?

Conceptually, the latter would be consistent with setting the default CLI shell. For example:

loginShell: /bin/bash
loginXSession: gnome

Thanks in advance! – RJ

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Pretty quiet here…

Did I post post my question in the wrong place or is GNOME3 becoming too single-user desktop oriented for enterprise/network deployments?

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Considering that there are multiple corporate/network login mechanisms inside the GNOME/GDM/control center code, I doubt that. As far as I can see, it’s mostly Kerberos-based, though.

You may have more luck asking on a CentOS/Red Hat forum.

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I found the patch that changes the default session to GNOME Classic: Tree - rpms/gdm - CentOS Git server

It reads /etc/sysconfig/desktop, but you can only set it to KDE; anything else is interpreted as GNOME Classic.

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