On Thu, 10 Aug 2017 at 14:30:30 -0700, Mark Hedges wrote: > I verified that other X programs are working through the ssh tunnel, like > xeyes > and gvim.
I didn't see you mention previously that you were using a ssh tunnel. Are you using X-forwarding to have their windows appear on a machine that is not the one actually executing the code? This is not the normal use-case for Linux desktop software (any more), and programs with the same client/server, single-instance behaviour as gnome-terminal will not necessarily work in this environment. The model of what it means to be in a login session that is used by dbus-user-session is not designed for X-forwarding, and it is possible that dbus-x11 works better in that environment. The central issue with dbus-x11 is that nobody is sure what is meant to work and what merely works by coincidence, which makes it difficult to reason about and maintain - if someone reports a bug, we cannot know whether fixing that bug will break it for someone else (for example, you). That's why we prefer dbus-user-session for new installations - its model has the advantage of being very simple. Adding a dbus-x11 dependency to gnome-terminal for this would not be appropriate. We set the dependencies according to what works for the most normal use-cases, and X-forwarding is not among those any more - if that is what you want then it's up to you to arrange for it to work. If you want to use dbus-x11's model of what is a session (one session per (uid, machine, X11 display) tuple) then you will need to remove the dbus-user-session package in addition to installing dbus-x11. If you have both installed, and you are booting with systemd, then dbus-user-session takes precedence. S