Personally, I don't use display managers, so starting the X session via command line is simple enough for me. I remember liking LXDM a lot, and as far as I can recall, it's not at all affected by Systemd.

The uber coolest of all login managers is WDM - (GnuStep - Windowmaker based). GUI selection of WMs and DEs and all, and it is maintained I believe.

Thanks for the suggestion.
I was expecting it, it is not as if I have never heard it. 8^7

But I am not a coder or programmer, just an advanced (?) user with a few years of (more hardware than software) experience but who can't find his way around bash.

Actually, I'm an architect by trade who got into IT to make ends meet when recession and lack of work hit me broadside in 1995.
As you can imagine, I'd have no idea where to start and at 65+ I'm rather past the point of wanting to find out.

But IMO, the truth is that as SLiM is not news, shiny or desired, one wants to maintain it.

Like I said, a pity.

A.

It's quite allright.
Happens.

I would have to agree ...

But (if I recall correctly) not having a DM brought along quite a few (permission?) issues that surfaced while I was installing ASCII.
Cannot recall but installing SLiM solved everything right away and that was it.

So that's why I use SLiM.
I didn't even want the log-on process to execute startx.

I've set it up as simple as possible.
A dark screen with a cursor line: no 'USER', 'PASSWORD' or field to fill out, no 'Shutdown', 'Reboot' or 'Session'.

I wanted to also eliminate the cursor (I know there's a way in the SLiM config file) but never go around to it.

Indeed it is.

Being things as they are, for the moment I have no choice but to stay with SLiM.
And still think it is a real pity it has been abandoned.

Cheers,

A.

how about freebsd and alpine

The posted snippet will also work for Alpine but X won't be run under the normal user so I would actually recommend to install elogind and sway instead and then disable the setuid bit on the sway binary for a rootless desktop.

To start sway use

[ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ] && exec sway

For FreeBSD you can also use that snippet but replace /dev/tty1 with the output of the tty command when it is run from the default login TTY (I don't use FreeBSD so I'm not sure how the consoles are identified).

That's just silly — the best display manager is clearly no display manager at all

SLiM runs X under the root user whereas a console login followed by startx[0] results in the X server being run under the normal user, which is clearly a major advantage (as is the lack of DM overhead).

[0] Automate the process by adding this line to the end of ~/.profile:

[ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ] && exec startx

Hello:

rdav wrote:

Hi fsmithred
... the ancient DM I use: "Slim".

SLiM...
It is not systemd compatible

A.

I may hang myself here, but I've built some Debian respins with live-build by request. I read in the Arch wiki that systemd doesn't play nicely with slim, so I used Lightdm in those builds.

In each one, I replaced lightdm with slim while testing them (for myself) for several weeks. I never had any issues with it on Debian/systemd.

Not sure what the issue is or could be...but then again...it didn't matter to me.

LOLOL!

Yes, I know ...

That's why I said:

~$ echo foo >&3
bash: 3: Bad file descriptor
groucho@devuan:~$ tail -1 /var/log/slim.log
slim: waiting for X server to begin accepting connections.
~$ ls -l /var/log/slim.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 403312 Sep  5 15:44 /var/log/slim.log
~$ whoami
groucho
~$ 

I really wanted to avoid using anything and just log in and startx from the command line.
But it proved problematic for a number of reasons related to other parts of the system, so I went with the simplest and (to me) less problematic DM.

Unsupported and all, I believe BSD had it as the default DM at least up to a couple of years ago.

I recall having seen an article on-line where it was voted the best DM out of 19. (found it!).

Cheers,

A.

I cannot but emphatically recommend SLiM to one and all

Maintenance for SLiM stopped in 2013 so any security issues will not be addressed.

For example it opens a log file as root and doesn't close the file handle properly before exec()ing the desktop session.

Try this:

echo foo >&3
tail -1 /var/log/slim.log
ls -l /var/log/slim.log
whoami

After trying the two or three out there, I cannot but emphatically recommend SLiM to one and all.
It is not systemd compatible which is not an issue for us but probably the reason nobody is taking care of it these days.

A real pity.
With so many capable developers out there, going after the newest shiniest whatever instead of supporting/maintaining good software.  :^ *

Cheers,

A.

Regards Glenn