Last week my mother in law started to share her Linux laptop with my wife. Suddenly my wife asked me how she could switch from one user session to another. She was looking for something similar to OS X fast user switch feature but she couldn’t find it. In fact there wasn’t a fast and easy way to switch between users’ sessions with KDE, until… now :)

Let me introduce my first plasmoid: the fast user switch plasmoid. It’s a simple icon in the panel that allows users to swich to another open session or to open a new login page. Here you can see the mandatory screenshots.

{% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch02.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch01.png %}

You can find the source code here. Binary packages for openSUSE are already available on the build service.

One last thought about KDM

I think that KDM should allow to switch back to an already open session in a more transparent way. Right now if an user has already one session open, he goes back to the login screen and enters his credentials a **new ** session is started. I think that most users would expect to be switched back to their already running session. Starting a new session is just confusing for them.