LightDM Display Manager 2022 Status Update: Not Much Going On

[luno]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Greetd works perfectly with many frontends for Qt ,GTK , Wlr and many more it is pretty lightweight

[scottishduck]

SDDM needs to be brought into the KDE project because it is dying. Tight integration between greeter and desktop can provide a lot of benefits and at the moment SDDM is definitely not doing that.

[hax0r]

i wish systemd came with its own login manager, build it on EGL so there's no Qt/GTK toolkit dependency, or it could maybe built into the DE's shell itself

[Charlie68]

I fear SDDM is going the same way, looks like nothing happens for months on end, then there will be a flurry of activity, then nothing again, not been a new release since 2020

SDDM version 0.19 has just arrived, also I don't know if already with this version or if you have to wait for 0.20, SDDM no longer needs root privileges, so it should be possible to start SDDM directly on wayland, I don't know if these changes have already been merged, but I'm sure the devs are working on them, as I've read discussions to that effect.

[_r00t-]

SDDM needs to be brought into the KDE project because it is dying. Tight integration between greeter and desktop can provide a lot of benefits and at the moment SDDM is definitely not doing that.

Definitely this is the best choice. We haven't seen any update lately.

[middy]

Yeah... I kinda wish the KDE devs wrote their own from scratch. So many of their PRs get ignored. It would allow them to make it wayland friendly too (and possibly QT6 compatible considering their huge ongoing effort).

Though it would probably suck for users to get yet another breaking change (also possibly with theming).

kde did. it was called kdm, which they replaced with sddm lol.

SDDM version 0.19 has just arrived, also I don't know if already with this version or if you have to wait for 0.20, SDDM no longer needs root privileges, so it should be possible to start SDDM directly on wayland, I don't know if these changes have already been merged, but I'm sure the devs are working on them, as I've read discussions to that effect.

what's your definition of "just arrived" because its been two years. to me, and i'm sure for many others, two years isn't "just arrived."

[FireBurn]

Yeah... I kinda wish the KDE devs wrote their own from scratch. So many of their PRs get ignored. It would allow them to make it wayland friendly too (and possibly QT6 compatible considering their huge ongoing effort).

Though it would probably suck for users to get yet another breaking change (also possibly with theming).

Yeah, might be easier than rebasing kdm

[FireBurn]

SDDM version 0.19 has just arrived, also I don't know if already with this version or if you have to wait for 0.20, SDDM no longer needs root privileges, so it should be possible to start SDDM directly on wayland, I don't know if these changes have already been merged, but I'm sure the devs are working on them, as I've read discussions to that effect.

• 3 Nov 2020 - and a dollar short

There is no "on wayland" - it needs to be its own wayland compositor - which is in git, I know it's being worked on here and there, but then everything goes quiet for months at a time, even the tickets asking for a new version to be tagged go unanswered

[sinepgib]

i wish systemd came with its own login manager, build it on EGL so there's no Qt/GTK toolkit dependency, or it could maybe built into the DE's shell itself

Not sure if sarcastic, but if serious, rather than EGL it would make sense for it to simply draw via drm. systemd already assumes a Linux kernel and that's the standards. Or maybe fbdev.

[Luke_Wolf]

From scratch doesn't make any sense at all, forking SDDM would be a much better starting point.

They're actually not that big of programs, from scratch actually does make perfect sense.

LightDM is 2.5k LOC
SDDM is 16k LOC
GDM is 65k LOC

The real question is why are they basically all dead? Is it a particularly difficult problem even for such a small codebase or is it that it's so trivial that it's not a problem anyone is interested in?