I have several machines running SuSE tumbleweed, and a server that has my users home directories NFS exported. These are mounted on the client machines as needed.
If I login to machine A as user X then my desktop works without problems. If I then login to machine B as user X (whilst still logged into machine A), then my desktop severely lags and misbehaves. Note I can login to B as user Y (or indeed root) without problems so I guess it boils down to something in X’s home directory being conflicted.
Is there a way to configure X so that this does not happen, I suspect something needs to be set so that different machines use different folders in the home directory?
When you log in two times with the same user and the same home directory (on the same system or on different system with the same home directory through NFS), I can imagine that The desktop software involved gets confused. Imagine e.g. that you change desktop configurations, what should the other session do. And this might be an obvious example, but there could be things more hidden.
Basically this. While the obvious first thing to make sure of is that the user on both machines has the same UID and primary GID, that’s not going to solve the basic fact that modern Linux desktop environments (and the majority of user software) are made with the expectation that they will only ever be run on a local host with only one seat accessing their settings at a time.
You might be able to start isolating each DE on a per-host basis by changing the XDG variables but that will impact more than just xfce and you would very much be on your own figuring out why things go wrong.