Comment 8 for bug 823718

Just a little provoking question? What is actually the point of AccountsService?

The fact that AccountsService stores the default session and language for a user *locally* in /var/lib/AccountsService/users/$USER is actually a very bad idea. There is a reasoning behind .dmrc being stored in the home directory which is to be independent of the login machine.

Imagine the scenario of a big university department with hundreds of students and a computer pool. These students continuously switch computers and AccountsService is actually a hindrance in this case. Whenever a student hops to a different machine, they have to set their default session and language again. What's even worse, since they don't know which machines they have used, it might be necessary to set their defaults again or it might be not.

So, to conclude, switching from .dmrc to AccountsService has actually reduced the flexibility of lightdm with no apparent gain in functionality (unless I miss something).

It should be configurable in the lightdm configuration whether AccountsService or .dmrc are used (since we depend on this feature). I'm going to file a bug report on this and if the lightdm developers decide not to fix it anytime soon, I'm going to jump to fix it myself :).

Cheers,

Adrian