Start a systemd user service with graphical session in GNOME 40

Desktop
9

What distribution? Can you check the parameters that your running gnome-session-binary got when logging in?

What you can do:

  1. Just paste the logs, maybe you overlooked something relevant
  2. Modify /usr/bin/gnome-session to pass --debug to gnome-session-binary for more debug output

At the end of the day, I don’t really have enough information right now to say more. It still sounds like you are getting a non-systemd login, but there are only two ways of that happening:

  1. --builtin is explicitly passed to gnome-session-binary (or, the distribution patches it and requires --systemd to be passed).
  2. The systemd target can’t be activated and gnome-session-binary falls back.