KDE’s login manager, SDDM, has its share of problems, and as such, a number of KDE developers are working on replacement to fix many of these long-standing issues. So, what exactly is wrong with SDDM as it exists today?
With SDDM, power management is reinvented from scratch with bespoke configuration. We can’t integrate with Plasma’s network management, power management, volume controls, or brightness controls without reinventing them in the desktop-agnostic backend.
SDDM was already having to duplicate too much functionality we have in KDE, which was very frustrating when we’re left maintaining it.
↫ David Edmundson
On top of that, theming is also a big issue with SDDM, as it doesn’t adopt any of the existing Plasma themes, wallpapers, and so on, forcing users to manually makes thse changes for SDDM, and forcing theme developers to make custom themes just for SDDM instead of it just adopting Plasma’s settings. The new login manager they’re working on will instead make use of existing Plasma components and be brought up like Plasma itself, too.
For now, the SDDM replacement is roughly at feature parity with SDDM, but it’s by no means ready for widespread adoption by distributions or users. Developers interested in trying it out can do so, though, and as it mostly looks like the existing default SDDM setup, you won’t even notice anything in day-to-day use.
The efforts of killing off classical DM’s like AmiWM in debian is insane, i do not know how this could be allowed. even if you compile the latest version with any build version on latest debian you end up with a dead screen (out of sync or just a black screen) but it works on the stable version. I have talked to him (the dev) and he is very responsive (that is why my amiwmrc is a novel level of long) Wayland can not provide the paper paradigm, so i can never go back to stacked-non paper windowing.
Luckily AmiWM will be updated, just as he did for fullscreen video, it just takes time.
To explain: Paper paradigm is that you have stacking windows on each paper and you can transfer any application window between papers, but you have as many papers as you want (i usually to stay at four, kinda like virtual desktops but more functional.) And you can move an entire paper or lower said workset paper to another, merge or separate. It is hard to explain, but the loss of amiwm with wayland is disturbing.
NaGERST xwayland rootful is an option to run these older windows manages in a Window under Wayland solutions.
AmiWM is a stacking windows manager.. Labwc and waybox that openbox operations brought to wayland do show stacking designs can be done in Wayland.
I guess you have never looked at openbox or never liked openbox.
Hell, I’m still using xdm! Still using vnc over ssh for remote access, couple lines of config to xdm, and everything integrates no fuss no muss.
Glad to see this happening. SDDM is a fine project but the lack of integration with KDE (or really anything else) is kinda baffling and sometimes a little frustrating. A user shouldn’t have to e.g. separately configure accessibility settings, display scaling, etc. for both their desktop environment and their login manager, and it’s nice when the login manager inherits other settings (think pointer speed or touchpad sensitivity) from the DE as well.