Do you know if it's possible to run a second session in a window?

talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 66 points –

I'm not much hoepful, but... just in case :)

I would like to be able to start a second session in a window of my current one (I mean a second session where I log in as a different user, similar to what happens with the various ctrl+alt+Fx, but starting a graphical session rather than a console one).

Do you know of some software that lets me do it?

Can I somehow run a KVM using my host disk as a the disk for the guest VM (and without breaking stuff)?

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I'd imagine you could run a VNC server, and then just login from the same PC. This kinda what you're looking for?

There are some limitations, like I don't think hardware acceleration would work, for example.

Edit: I did a little searching for "nested x-session" and found out that there is a specific x11 program to do exactly what you want called xephyr. There's also a brief guide on the arch wiki.

It's a lot easier with Wayland and hardware acceleration works, see my solution. It does a proper login session and starts the whole DE exactly the same way as if you logged in from a tty too so everything just works as expected there. Wayland devs use that a lot for testing and development so it's quite well supported overall.