Xfce Forum

Fragrant1470

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2025-03-01

Posts: 41

does xfce4-session support saving multiple sessions or not?

Does xfce4-session program support having multiple sessions to choose from on login for one user in the Sessions tab of Session and Startup?

On my system it doesn't and GPT tells me that is the case, but I'm not sure. This is clearly an interface for displaying multiple sessions, and not one.

So why can't I save the current session as something else than "Default" and each time a session is saved, it's an update of the "Default" and not a new entry?

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,179

Re: does xfce4-session support saving multiple sessions or not?

It looks like there may be a bug there. If I save the current session, and select the option to "Display chooser on login", and then log out and log in again, I will get the session chooser to display. I click the "+" to create a new session. Unfortunately, its not loaded and displayed until I log out and in one more time.

Unfortunately, the session choose does not display on a wayland login.

Somewhat relevant existing bug report: https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/-/issues/184.

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Beacephisely

Member

Registered: 2024-12-30

Posts: 3

Re: does xfce4-session support saving multiple sessions or not?

Does xfce4-session program support having multiple sessions to choose from on login for one user in the Sessions tab of Session and Startup?

On my system it doesn't and GPT tells me that is the case, but I'm not sure. This is clearly an interface for displaying multiple sessions, and not one.  By the way, if you ever want to explore this kind of question differently — like brainstorming ideas, generating summaries of documentation, or even writing short shell scripts — I’ve found https://overchat.ai/chat/ai-brainrot-generator surprisingly handy. It’s a free tool that lets you bounce these technical thoughts around with various AI models.

So why can't I save the current session as something else than "Default" and each time a session is saved, it's an update of the "Default" and not a new entry?

You’re right — by design, xfce4-session doesn’t support multiple named sessions per user out of the box. The “Sessions” tab you see is primarily there to manage saved sessions vs. starting with an empty session, and it shows what will be restored on login, but it doesn’t let you create multiple separately named sessions to pick from.

Each time you save a session, it essentially overwrites the previous default session for that user. That’s why you can’t create “Session1”, “Session2”, etc. and choose between them at login — it’s simply not built into xfce4-session.

Some people work around this by scripting manual backups of ~/.cache/sessions/ and swapping them before login, or by using different user accounts. But natively, XFCE doesn’t provide multiple selectable sessions for a single user like, say, some KDE setups might.

Hope this clears it up a bit!