It’s a Cookiecutter template for creating a custom desktop environment with gnome-session as the session manager. This is typically used for standalone window managers (WMs for short) (e.g., bspwm, Hyprland) and its desktop components (e.g., Polybar, eww, ags). The gnome-session configuration is based from Phosh session files and GNOME Shell session manager files.
This template is meant to be built with Meson and Nix for generating the session files typically used for my custom workflow modules in my NixOS configuration.
As an example, you could take a look at Mosey Branch workflow module desktop session.
This is meant to be customized further with the Meson build script and whatnot (just look at the TODO comments in the project after initializing the template).
As an option, this Cookiecutter template also considers if the custom GNOME session is just modifying the current GNOME session (which is based from GNOME v44 at the time of writing).
To do that, just set the workflow_extends_gnome parameter to true.
This is used for creating desktop sessions like i3-gnome or just creating a minimal version of GNOME.
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Why use gnome-session?
Two words: session management. Session management is pretty much essential for a better and more stable integrated workflow. As an example, the Mosey Branch desktop environment which is just Hyprland plus other components is launching without crashes (unlike what is reported from documentation) all thanks to gnome-session. It also happens to solve some of the very nuanced problems with the typical standalone window managers setup such as the lack of initializing the proper environment. This is pretty much the problem that I had back when I using bspwm when I realized my system-wide custom environment variables are not set for whatever reason. The solution that I have to do (with my less knowledgeable self at the time) is to disable the display manager entirely and start the session manually in TTY. Same when I had used Sway back then.
As for why gnome-session is used, it is the only customizable session manager out there allowing you to completely replace the entire GNOME session if you want to (which we will do so). Furthermore, it supports both systemd- and non-systemd-managed desktop sessions (but it is only nice-to-have, we’re fully relying on systemd for desktop session management here). Most importantly, it can support both Wayland and Xorg desktop sessions which is REALLY nice (meaning we don’t have to worry about session management for each case anymore). Dealing with those conditions in mind is not going to be great which what gnome-session does best so why not use it?
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Why not use systemd itself for managing those desktop sessions?
While you can certainly do that, gnome-session supports managing through systemd (which it already does by default since 3.34). We’re using gnome-session since it already does what I want to do which is initializing the desktop environment appropriate for Wayland or Xorg.
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Why not use any other session manager?
Any other session managers are often specific only to Xorg (e.g., xsm, sessiond) or Wayland (e.g., uwsm). gnome-session offers both and I only to have to be familiarize myself with it once since the session management process for both protocols are the same. Win-win.
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Isn’t GNOME very restrictive? This isn’t very GNOME of them.
You can think of GNOME as a cousin of AwesomeWM. GNOME is very opinioniated but it is very extensible once you’ve gone outside of its settings with its extensions (especially if you create your own) and its components.
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Why not open programs in the window managers' configuration?
Typically standalone window managers such as Hyprland, i3, and sway allow you to arbitrarily open programs at startup but they’re not great. It is clunky having those essential startup process and not being able to easily debug and view them logs (unless you’ve configured each program to put it through a log file) unlike with gnome-session-with-systemd-managed desktop session that can be debugged a
journalctlaway. With this in mind, any gnome-session-configured desktop sessions means you don’t have to manually open those programs in the WM configuration. -
Any other things to keep in mind?
Well, this template assumes you’re going to create a desktop environment with the already existing software out there. You need some familiarity with the desktop components at a lower level such as systemd, dbus, and how a graphical session is managed. Oh right, there’s also an upcoming release for xdg-desktop-portals allowing you to configure which portal implementations a desktop environment prefer which is VERY NICE!