Session Capplet

Current "Sessions" capplet problems:

• Bad name / organization; it contains "things related to gnome-session", rather than being a group of things that are actually related in the user's mental model

• Forces users to enter command lines to add autostart items
• XSMP and autostart are kept completely separate
• XSMP stuff ("Current Session") is full of all sorts of confusing stuff
  • Meanings of columns and icons aren't obvious and aren't explained
  • command lines instead of app names

The only really useful thing you can do from the "Current Session" page is force an auto-restarted app like nautilus or metacity to actually quit. That functionality seems like it should belongs in the System Monitor though. (When you try to end the process, it would ask whether you want to restart it again afterward or something. Or there would be two separate options.)

• VincentUntz: Totally agree. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421912

So the session capplet should just be about login, and should be renamed accordingly. And since the .../NewGnomeSession uses .desktop files for its default session rather than a text file like old-gnome-session, we can have icons and localized names given for all of the startup applications.

The general idea is to have a nautilus-like window full of application icons. To add an app to ~/.config/autostart, you just drag its launcher to the window. You can probably then right-click on it and edit the command line if you really need to. You should also be able to drag an app from the System Monitor, if you want to make a currently-running app be autostarted in the future. (Perhaps you can also do that directly from the System Monitor, and perhaps there's a way in the Session/Login capplet to see a list of currently-running apps that you can drag from.)

You can remove an app from autostart by dragging it to the trash, or right clicking and "Delete", etc. ../RequiredComponents describes the behavior when users try to delete important apps like metacity, the panel, etc.

Depending on what sort of support for saved sessions we end up with, there may be badges on app icons to indicate that they have saved state associated with them.

• VincentUntz: Hrm. I'm not sure the nautilus-like window makes things easier. The list we have in trunk looks good to me. And I believe the enable/disable part of the UI can be important (and would be hard to do in a nice way for a nautilus-like window). The only things missing right now are icons (shouldn't be hard to add) and drag and drop.