I don't know why, but when I initially started with Slackware 15.0 and used sddm as login manager I got an annoying on screen keyboard that if I remember right appeared when you started typing on the physical keyboard and then flickered on the screen.
This on screen keyboard behavior, the fact that sddm is in an 0.something version indicating that it might have more bugs than this and the fact that sddm developers has made it clear that they never will support xdmcp made me look for alternatives to sddm.
The most stable alternative included in Slackware was xdm, but it did lack functionality that you are used to in a modern environment like the ability to graphically choose between different sessions like xfce and plasma.
There are slackbuilds for gnome and gdm, but I was never able to make gdm work, I spent about one day on trying to get gdm to start without crashing.
There are also other lightweight desktop managers like lightdm and it would have been nice to find some lightweight alternative that does not require an entire desktop environment. However all these lightweight alternatives that I tried had some shortcoming.
I ended up with tdm which requires at least the base part of the trinity desktop environment. The good thing with tdm is that it very much resembles kdm which I have used on older versions of Slackware and supports all the functionality that I have become used to:
- Graphical choise of desktop environment / window manager
- Capable of showing lists of users, not only local users but also users from catalog service like NIS
- Works well with screensavers like xscreensaver "switch user" functionality to start a new X session as a new user
- Supports xdmcp
- And, as a bonus, has a configuration file looking like the configuration file of good old kdm
regards Henrik
