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steve_v

Member

Registered: 2018-01-11

Posts: 692  

Please, reccommend me a display-manager that isn't garbage

* Can launch both X and wayland sessions (primarily plasma, with options for e.g. icewm or FVWM on X11), without itself requiring an Xserver (wayland-native GUI or console TUI is fine).
* Provides menus (again, GUI or TUI is fine) for username and session type / command.
* Isn't abandoned/dormant/full of never fixed bugs and unmerged pull requests (tuigreet, sddm).
* Exhibits reliable, repeatable, deterministic behaviour when launched from either/both sysvinit and openrc (sddm).
* Does not, under any circumstances, crash and leave my TTY in an unusable state (again, sddm).
* Doesn't entail writing wrapper scripts, manually setting common environment variables, or more hand-configuration than some entire operating systems (most of greetd & co).
* Isn't written in zig, go, rust, or some other trendy "modern" language that requires 900MB of tooling and 1200 "crates" to build a text-box.
* Isn't GTK4.

About the closest I can find is lidm, I mean I have no idea if it'll be rewritten from-scratch next month like everything else, but at least it's not written in zig...

Anything else?

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pcalvert

Member

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 315  

Re: Please, reccommend me a display-manager that isn't garbage

Hi Steve,

I'm not really qualified to answer your question, but I thought I'd take a stab at it anyway. What I did was pretend that I was looking for a lightweight display manager to see what I could find.

So far, this is what I was able to find:

NIC-DE Login Manager (nic-login)
"Lightweight framebuffer-based display manager for Linux (NIC-DE)."
https://github.com/nicfio/nic-login

The Ly display manager
"A lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD."
https://codeberg.org/fairyglade/ly

The second one is definitely the more interesting one, at least to me. Looking more closely, the first one appears to require systemd, but I left it there in case there is some way to easily work around that.

Phil

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greenjeans

Member

Registered: 2017-04-07

Posts: 1,644  

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Re: Please, reccommend me a display-manager that isn't garbage

Anything else?

You want me to make you one?

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steve_v

Member

Registered: 2018-01-11

Posts: 692  

Re: Please, reccommend me a display-manager that isn't garbage

The Ly display manager
"A lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD."

Sounds good on paper, until you realise "ncurses like" means "doesn't actually use ncurses, instead reinvents it in zig". It's not packaged in Debian, and while there are ebuilds for Gentoo, that just makes needing to install the whole zig toolchain for a text box slightly less annoying.

You want me to make you one?

I was getting dangerously close to doing that myself, but between gathering patches from not-dead forks and a couple of my own, I think I might have got tuigreet into a mostly usable state. It's still rust and it's still part of the "1200 crates" ecosystem, which is irritating, but at least that's a toolchain I already have installed for firefox & co.

Honestly, this is all in service of my biennial "can wayland completely replace X yet / can you comfortably run a desktop system without an xserver installed" investigation.
The answer is still "not really" (unless it's GNOME, maybe).

Last edited by steve_v (Yesterday 19:55:08)

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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times is Official GNOME Policy.

zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 1,270  

Re: Please, reccommend me a display-manager that isn't garbage

depends what you consider garbage.

I consider minimal yet easy to use to be non-garbage which if so would mean console-tdm which isn't in debian repos to my knowledge.

But if you mean easy and user friendly, something like lxdm or lightdm or slim might fit.

Depends on which works best right now.

I honestly have no clue. Stuff breaks sometimes with upgrades in annoying yet minor ways.

I have however had no problem with lxdm usually and sometimes slim is good.

Last edited by zapper (Today 02:15:01)

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