I was using a stripped down lxsession to get my basic X Session going on my main devel workstation. Then I decided to upgrade to Debian-8. And what? Yeah. Things break, as usual.

My session is not simple, it has grown for like 15 years or so. Here are some bare details:

• roxterm with monofur is my main terminal
• pidgin for xmpp, with its own gtkrc!
• xfce4-panel
• xfwm4 as the wm

So I was able to pinpoint one issue to the new builtin xsettingsd in lxsession. It wants to force a theme on everything. Except: I don't want that. My pidgin has a handcrated gtkrc! Finally found how to disable that. Okay, Now that looks better.

But xfce4-panel did have a different menu. I was not able to find out, what is happening there, at least not easily.

So I thought: Drop lxsession, let's try xfce4-session. I use their WM and Panel anyway, maybe the session thing is okay. After fiddling with the xml config file and setting up my session, most things looked better. Except: I was not able to get rid of xfxsettingsd. I wasn't able to easily find out, where it got started. In my next debugging session, I'm going to use process accounting to find out, where it gets started from.

So what am I doing currently? Right, No lxsession, no xfce4-session. What then? xterm. Yeah, currently my complete X-Session is tied to a small xterm. If I close it, the session is gone. It feels like 1998 or so. Let's see, if I get that debugged in the next time.