If the distro defaults to a display manager, I generally use it.

I don't use one on Slackware.

My main distro is AntiX, & on there I just autologin to the desktop, so yes, I use a DM - but if I install an O/S like OpenBSD, then I just use startx, it doesn't worry me either way.

I simply prefer an X display manager login. Unlike some of the replies, I almost always change the manager to something simple that is reliable even with Nvidia and works on all my systems (freeBSD, Devuan, Slackware). Currently, I'm using wdm since I can compile (build) it from source if needs be, it is easy to configure and it seems to work on everything.

I prefer xdm. Yes, it's "ugly" as someone commented. But it's the easiest one to configure to run my ~/.xsession file, which starts keychain if needed, opens two terminal windows and runs the window manager session.

Also, I only log in when I reboot, which is no more frequent than once per week. Sometimes I go for months between reboots and logins.

On two of my three Linux systems I use KDM, because I know how to set it up and it is more flexible. The third (an old system without much RAM or disk storage) I had to use XDM as it was the only one available (I never installed any other DE than XFCE there and it didn't come with a display manager at that time - don't know about now).
That system is an old Dell with only 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB disk, XFCE (4.2.x) runs fine on it, didn't ever see a real need to install KDE or likewise ON it.
Because of XDM I cannot shutdown or reboot from XFCE, so I modified the inittab to let ctrl-alt-del do that (shutdown, I mean, that system is mostly down, maybe started a few times per month).

Me too.

Why don't you change the runlevel (3 instead of 5) for the startup procedure? I think you can do that in YAST else you'll probably have to do a "man systemctl" .

I was a staunch startxer for a long time (via a symlink named x, 'cause typing's hard, y'know ) but lately succumbed to the DM.

When I first started with Linux my distro's default was a DM login with a far-too-heavy DE, which on that box was something like watching Rome being built out of treacle. Discovering startx was a major breakthrough - plain X with some lightweight window manager, like GUIs were supposed to be.

I voted "text login and startx" because that is what I do most of the time, but I really do both (multiple distros set up in VirtualBox and dual booting an old laptop either to a CLI or GUI). Depends on what I need at the time.

No, text login and startx.

Console text login and startx. I like being able to fall back to the console if a 'wine' program messes up my screen resolution. Sometimes I like to investigate some aspect of the system without Xwindow running. Especially with all of the systemd and containerization changes.

xdm is theme-able. Robby Workman's slackware-xdm-theme is quite nice, and I've seen others that were nice, too.

For me, it depends. If it came with one with the standard install, I use it, if it doesn't, I don't. So:

Yes: Linux Mint, Devuan, OpenBSD
No: Slackware (because runlevel 3 is default), Gentoo

1 members found this post helpful.

I use a display manager mostly because the other user of my system has no idea how to use a CLI, even to log in and type startx. If it was 100% my own laptop, I'd just have full disk encryption with a password I have to enter to boot it up, then log in automatically on boot.

Hi d745fba1cb70ab9dc02a80ee. Just curious - how would you setup auto login with LUKS and no display manager?

I might have to use a display manager to do that. I didn't mean to imply that I was not going to use one. However, I guess I could in theory make a simple script that automatically runs on boot and starts my session.