So, if I understand it correctly, under Wayland the user session is supposed to be managed by a user instance of systemd. In particular, I think(?), this means that all kinds of session daemons are converted to systemd units and started by systemd --user instead of gnome-session. I think, it is a good idea to switch to this kind of session management for X as well for forward compatibility (and for the cool features that systemd may provide for this use-case, although I am not sure if there are any).

According to this GNOME blog post, GNOME 3.34 actually does it this way.

So, here is the question: I don’t see this on my system, even though Pantheon relies heavily on GNOME, and I see pieces of GNOME 3.36 all around – why is that? Is this an artefact of GNOME packaging for NixOS (i.e. if I enable GNOME as a DE on NixOS, will it use systemd?) or is this due to how Elementary reuses GNOME in such an old way and thus an upstream bug? Or is this an artefact of specifically how Pantheon is packaged for NixOS?

(cc @worldofpeace)