The ability to allow multiple users to log in simultaneously is essential for home/desktop, but it seems impossible (at least with Debian/Testing) unless full Gnome desktop is installed as well. Since GDM is no longer available (only GDM3), any attempt to get anything related to gdmflexiserver working, will trigger a long tread of dependencies and pretty much request a full gnome 3 install! What a disappointment. So, would it be possible to implement multi-user, or the ability to run multiple sessions without relying on Gnome? Thanks, Del
Install lightdm
lightdm is already installed. lightdm outputs errors related to gdmflexiserver if/when attempting to switch user while another user is logged in.
Then I suggest that you please ask in your distro's forum how to solve that. Really, besides Xfce having a panel plugin for user switching this has nothing to do with it. And even if it uses gdmflexiserver, lightdm supports that OOTB and even if you use another DM like LXDM you can make a script to switch user and call it gdmflexiserver. There's absolutely no GNOME need for that. I'm not a developer but I'm telling you this because that's how it is. And it has nothing to do with xfce4-session.
Okay, I'll try to have it resolved on Debian instead of XFCE, since I found many bugs requests here that have been open since even 2007 without any resolution. It seems that the best way to fix this issue is to do switching via the LightDM DBus interface org.freedesktop.DisplayManager as suggested on another thread, but I don't see how. Now, as far as this comment goes: "There's absolutely no GNOME need for that." Look where it usually ends every time: $ sudo apt-get install xfswitch-plugin ... The following NEW packages will be installed: accountsservice app-install-data at-spi2-core brasero brasero-common cdrdao dconf-tools gcr gdm3 gir1.2-clutter-1.0 gir1.2-clutter-gst-1.0 gir1.2-cogl-1.0 gir1.2-coglpango-1.0 gir1.2-evince-3.0 gir1.2-gst-plugins-base-0.10 gir1.2-gstreamer-0.10 gir1.2-gtkclutter-1.0 gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 gnome-desktop3-data gnome-icon-theme-symbolic gnome-keyring gnome-session-bin gnome-settings-daemon gnome-sushi gnome-user-guide gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio gvfs-backends hwdata libaccountsservice0 libasound2-plugins libatspi2.0-0 libbluetooth3 libbrasero-media3-1 libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk0 libcap-ng0 libcap2-bin libclutter-gst-1.0-0 libelf1 libexempi3 libgck-1-0 libgcr-3-1 libgcr-3-common libgjs0b libglib2.0-bin libgmime-2.6-0 libgnome-desktop-3-2 libgnomekbd-common libgnomekbd7 libgpgme11 libgtksourceview-3.0-0 libgtksourceview-3.0-common libmetacity-private0a libmozjs185-1.0 libmusicbrainz5-0 libpackagekit-glib2-14 libpam-cap libpam-gnome-keyring libpth20 libpulse-mainloop-glib0 libquvi-scripts libquvi7 libsystemd-daemon0 libtotem-plparser17 libtracker-sparql-0.14-0 libwacom-common libwacom2 libwebrtc-audio-processing-0 libyelp0 metacity metacity-common nautilus nautilus-data pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils python-aptdaemon.pkcompat python-packagekit rtkit xfswitch-plugin xserver-xephyr yelp yelp-xsl 0 upgraded, 84 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 2,475 kB/44.6 MB of archives. After this operation, 156 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n Abort. In another words... no matter how I tried, I always fell in this Gnome dependencies vortex.
Yes, but that's 1) a xfswitch-plugin issue, not xfce4-session's, 2) a packaging issue that's a responsibility of the distribution as it doesn't need gdm now with lightdm. Also stable Xfce is already 4.10 so there's no sense in reporting bugs for 4.8. I think there's a thread in forum.xfce.org about building Xfce 4.10 in Debian testing but I heard it's available too in the experimental repo.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 2819 ***