Hi I am a home user (and by no means a systems administrator whatsoever) of Rocky 8.8 Workstation with Gnome desktop.
I noticed by chance today that I had 2 users running on my system.
I do not know much about Linux users but I ended up running the “w” command that gave the following output when Firefox is running:
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
main seat0 login- 17:22 0.00s 0.00s 0.00s /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session gnome-session
main tty2 tty2 17:22 8:01 2:50 0.21s /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 28 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 30120 -prefMapSiz
I would like to ask the following:
Is it ok to have my username being mentioned twice? IE this is not a hack into my system or anything?
I assume “/gdm-wayland-session --register-session gnome-session” represents me logged into Rocky and this is normal - is this correct?
I dont understand why there would be a second instance of my username associated with “/usr/lib64/firefox/firefox” - I would assume there would be a single user “main” that is running firefox, not firefox running as second instance of my user name. Is this ok / normal? Is there anything to be concerned about here?
Likely nothing to be worried about, provided running “loginctl” shows you as the single actual user on the system.
It’s totally normal to see your username listed more than once, depending on which utility you use to check things, whether or not you’re using a graphical desktop (such as Gnome, in your case), and whether or not you have terminals (command line) open.
As you’ve tried running the “w” command, and hopefully also the “loginctl” command by now, try the “who” command next – even different details there (w and who are not the same!)
I’ve no idea why firefox would be listed as well–perhaps it a Gnome thing? I haven’t used it in many years, so unsure on that question.
@LinuxGuy1997 thanks very much for your help
I ran:
loginctl
and got:
SESSION UID USER SEAT TTY
2 1000 main seat0 tty2
1 sessions listed.
Which seems to me that there is one user main that has a seat and TYY associated with it - please let me know if I am wrong about how I am interpreting that.