CentOS 7 no desktop, loginctl --output=json does not give json

[James-Pickett]

The desktop app icon does not work on centos 7. Logs show the loginctl list-sessions --output=json command returns invalid json. Testing on CentOS 7 vm, loginctl does not output json even when --output=json option is provided.

[RebeccaMahany]

I see this on a CentOS 7 VM also. systemd version is 219 -- looks like this was maybe fixed sometime after version 245 per systemd/systemd#15275

Per https://repology.org/project/systemd/versions I tried CentOS Stream 9, and that does look like it would work:

$ loginctl --version
systemd 252 (252-21.el9)
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX -APPARMOR +IMA +SMACK +SECCOMP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +OPENSSL +ACL +BLKID +CURL +ELFUTILS -FIDO2 +IDN2 -IDN -IPTC +KMOD +LIBCRYPTSETUP +LIBFDISK +PCRE2 -PWQUALITY +P11KIT -QRENCODE +TPM2 +BZIP2 +LZ4 +XZ +ZLIB +ZSTD -BPF_FRAMEWORK +XKBCOMMON +UTMP +SYSVINIT default-hierarchy=unified
$ loginctl list-sessions --output=json
[{"session":"1","uid":1000,"user":"rebeccamahany-horton","seat":"","tty":"pts/0","state":"active","idle":false,"since":null}]

It also looks like CentOS 7 is EOL at the end of this June anyway.