Hi,

I'm surprised not to see LightDM on SBo or similar? Does this login manager have any weird dependencies on stuff like systemd and/or PAM?

Cheers,

Niki

from here http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/LightDM/

Not answer to your question but... Do we still need another display manager, beyond xdm, kdm and those available @ SBo: gdm, lxdm, and slim?

I'm looking for a nice login manager for Xfce.

• XDM is great for folks who consider running TWM as their main desktop.
• KDM means installing the KDE base under the hood.
• Slim is unusable on public systems, since shutdown/reboot actions require the root password.
• I never tried LXDM.
• For the moment, GDM seems to be the lesser evil, but I tend to avoid GNOME components whenever I can, hence my initial question.

Cheers,

Niki

LightDM in itself is pretty different from the ones you listed, since it is more like a base to plug greeters (the actual login dialog) in, which are not dependent on a toolkit, DE or programming language (if your language of choice has bindings for liblightdm). For example, greeters are available for KDE, Gnome, LXQt, Unity and more. You can even use it without a greeter, but obviously then only for automatic logins.

I see now. I would vote for gdm then. I just installed it (it needs only libgnomecanvas as dependency) and tried it just rebooting at runlevel 4. It's full featured (including remote secured sessions), allows to choose your language beyond the one deducted from $LANG, set the default session easily and needs zero configuration as it's the one picked up priority by /etc/rc.d/rc.4.

Still only my humble opinion, and I assume that you already tried it anyway.

I use LXDM. It's nice and highly configurable. Much easier to use your own wallpaper on the login screen.

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I still use wdm which uses libraries supplied by windowmaker. slim used to be based on wdm, until being re-written to use fltk(IIRC).

Not being rude... but can someone explain why one needs a login manager? I have been using Slackware since 1995 and I just login and type startx. In fact when I played with Debian the thing that annoyed me the most was the GUI login, so I disabled it.

I can see it maybe for a newbie user or some such... but even then... login and type startx is about as simple as it comes.

Again, really just a honest question... whatever works best for the user is the way to go... just seems like a waste of time and energy to even think about... just my opinion, not looking to upset anyone! ;-)

EDIT: In thinking about it some more... my view is quite narrow as I am the only one who uses my systems, I can see the value in a login manager especially for a shared machine.

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I do need a login manager for a laptop shared by my wife and my children. Each of them has its own set of data and more importantly its own background image

I used to start at runlevel 3, but after several years of doing that, I realized the only thing I was doing was typing startx as soon as I logged in. I ended up switching the default runlevel to 4 and then setting KDE to autologin my user. Definitely not the best security, but I don't care if my wife has access to my computer (she never bothers with it), and if someone breaks in, a simple username/password won't keep them from getting my stuff (I don't encrypt, because I just don't see the benefit in my case since I really only have media on the computer).

Starting up to runlevel 3 was part of my geek cred at the time, but I've moved past that and I don't feel the need to start at a prompt and then type a command to get a GUI (plus, I'd much rather do CLI work in a DE/WM for easy copy/paste and switching to a web browser). If I do have work that needs to be done at a lower init level, I'll either pass that to lilo, or I'll issue the command after I boot up.

Exactly, I came to that conclusion after some thought, makes perfect sense...

I guess 20 years of typing startx has it burned into my brain as THE way to do things (of course this is wrong). I think in my mind it keeps things simple, less chance of startup issues when using runlevel 3, and maybe why Pat does this by default.

Features:

Cheers

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You can prettify XDM. It will remain spartan (no face browser) but it can be more than the boring default:

Attached Thumbnails

 

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@ivandi: do not blindly trust Wikipedia. At time of writing there exists a standard neither for PAM nor for logind (although at least for the former a standard would be beneficial).

That being said, if we look at the file lightdm.conf that gathers all possible configuration settings we see that PAM is often mentioned. A "seat configuration" is also included. As this seat concept is AFAIK a systemd thing, that could give a clue

I am not saying that systemd and/or PAM are hard dependencies (I really don't know) but I assume that having them makes things at least easier.

Now, so many settings just for a display manager... That alone would make me look elsewhere.