Comment 89 for bug 1197395

This bug still exists in F17. It certainly seems to be a legitimate bug to me.

I want user isolation for two users, alice and bob, but I want bob to be able to throw windows up on alice's display, and those x11 apps to work correctly.

For example, alice allows bob access to her display:

   [alice@localhost] $ xhost +si:localuser:bob

Somehow bob gets a login shell, in my instance specfic instance, root does:

   [root@localhost] # su -l bob

Then bob exports his display to alice's desktop, local in this case,

   [bob@localhost] $ export DISPLAY=:0.0

and throws up a PDF

   [bob@localhost] $ evince misunderstanding-x11-fundamentals.pdf

only to receive:

** (evince:9077): CRITICAL **: unable to create '/run/user/alice/dconf'; dconf will not work properly.

(caveat, root was a bash login shell, su - by alice)

though the PDF displays on alice's desktop, evince prefs are not saved at all.

In reply to comment#21, seems to be that there is an issue with your statement. When su -luser, this is a login shell. Seems to me that loginuid should be changing at this point.

In my opinion su should not be knowing or caring anything about XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, evar. (*cough* *cough* hack.)

I don't care why app saving prefs (dconf) does not work but from a user perspective it seems intuitive that it should work and it doesn't.