We – the KDE-FreeBSD team – have been puzzling over sessions management for a bit when running a Plasma desktop (plain X11) on FreeBSD. There’s something tricksy going on with ConsoleKit sessions:

  • When started from SDDM, the menu, Leave allows you to logout or to lock the system. Any automatic screen lock or screen blanking never comes on. ck-list-sessions lists a session for you, but active is set to false.
  • When started from startx (e.g. by hand, no display manager) with the recommended .xinitrc, you have all the options you are entitled to according to configurations elsewhere in the system, so you may have shutdown, reboot, etc. and in this case running ck-list-sessions shows an active session.

We’re not sure what’s up here, but I figured I’ve give a little notice that there’s something weird, and it can be worked around by switching off the displaymanager and using this .xinitrc:

exec /usr/local/bin/ck-launch-session /usr/local/bin/startkde