In a stock GNOME session, programs called daemons or services run on the system as background processes. You should find the following daemons running by default:
The dbus-daemon provides a message bus daemon which programs can use to exchange messages with one another. dbus-daemon is implemented with the D-Bus library which provides one-to-one communication between any two applications.
For extended information, see the man page for dbus-daemon.
Credentials such as user name and password for various programs and websites are stored securely using the gnome-keyring-daemon. This information is written into an encrypted file called the keyring file and saved in the user's home directory.
For extended information, see the man page for gnome-keyring-daemon.
The gnome-session program is responsible for running the GNOME desktop environment with help of a display manager such as GDM, LightDM, or NODM. The default session for the user is set at the time of system installation by the system administrator. gnome-session typically loads the last session that ran successfully on the system.
For extended information, see the man page for gnome-session.
The gnome-settings-daemon handles settings for a GNOME session and for all programs that are run within the session.
For extended information, see the man page for gnome-settings-daemon.
gnome-shell provides the core user interface functionality for GNOME such as launching programs, browsing directories, viewing files and so on.
For extended information, see the man page for gnome-shell.
PulseAudio is a sound server for Linux, POSIX and Windows systems that lets programs output audio via the Pulseaudio daemon.
For extended information, see the man page for pulseaudio.
Depending on the user's setup, you may also see some of the following, among others:
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