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

steve_v · 2026-05-16 23:51:08

* 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?

pcalvert · 2026-05-17 07:19:52

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

greenjeans · 2026-05-17 12:49:47

Anything else?

You want me to make you one?

steve_v · 2026-05-17 19:45:46

pcalvert wrote:

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.

greenjeans wrote:

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 (2026-05-17 19:55:08)

zapper · 2026-05-18 02:14:11

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 (2026-05-18 02:15:01)

steve_v · 2026-05-18 04:57:07

console-tdm

Interesting, and appears to be pretty much pure shell too...
It'd be more interesting if the github page didn't have dead links to screenshots and unanswered issues dating back to 2021 though. Looks rather dead/abandoned to me, last commit was 7 years ago.
It also doesn't really look like a full display manager, more just a wrapper for startx to select an environment. Unless I'm missing something obvious, I see no login handling functionality at all.

tdm (1) is a console based display manager, presenting the user with a list of
available sessions after login.
tdminit: script executed at login
tdm: session selector after login.

(emphasis mine)
No "started by init", or "handle login" to be found, AFCocaineCT this is really just an app launcher in shell (which I would have written myself already, if that's what I was after), the user selection and login would still be getty.

zapper wrote:

lxdm or lightdm or slim

Those all run on X, do they not?

steve_v wrote:

without itself requiring an Xserver

The whole point of the exercise is graphical (or at least TUI/menu-driven) login and session selection, while not needing to run an xserver for the DM, which is kinda a prerequisite for the whole (somewhat dubious) "wayland is the future / x11 is deprecated" shtick.
That means either a wayland-native graphical DM that isn't both a memory-hog and a dog to configure, or a console TUI DM that can do the basics like presenting a list of users and sessions, providing power-off / reboot functions, remembering a users last/preferred session, and generally not looking absolutely awful.

Right now my short-list is lemurs or greetd+tuigreet. Both are (unfortunately and loudly) rust, but that's not a complete showstopper. Kinda hoping a not-rust equivalent existed, but so-so.

Last edited by steve_v (2026-05-18 06:04:52)

manyroads · 2026-05-18 09:37:44

FWIW, the arch wiki has detailed write-ups worth reading on the topic. Personally I use LightDM- for reasons that are 'top secret'.

deepforest · 2026-05-18 19:07:18

"Use Windows, Luke"©
don't suffer with Linux

F_Sauce · Yesterday 18:12:51

I don't no why or how your experience with 'sddm' became so awful but I had some issues myself.
However, I changed my installation approach from trying to set all up step by step, installing only what I wanted, to reverse the process; slim it down step by step.
My experience was that 'sddm' worked quite fine for me, with KDE I should point out, after that; I changed APT's 'recommends' and 'suggests' after installation and proceeded from there; I also edited sddm.conf, chose to use that approach, to force the use of x11 etc, (no wayland plasma).

To summarise, for my part 'sddm' is working quite well for my purposes; they're not very complicated, but on one pc I have messed about a bit with auto-login and some x11 glitches ignoring settings (it's on a daw) and all seems to work fine.
So I'm happy with SDDM.

Cheers,
Olav

steve_v · Yesterday 18:50:15

why or how your experience with 'sddm' became so awful

SDDM is supposed to be able to run wayland-native, using either kwin or weston as the compositor. Neither work, instead locking up the TTY and producing absolutely no clues as to why.
I've already spent many hours (and many blind-reboots) on that and I'd spend more, if it weren't for the ridiculous list of other unaddressed bugs in sddm - frankly the thing appears to be a lost cause at this point... The KDE project seems to agree insofar as forking it so they can ship a reliable (though systemd-dependent) DM for their upcoming (6.8) shift to wayland-only.

force the use of x11

Which is the exact opposite of what I am trying to achieve. I've repeated "without an Xserver for the display manager" more than once now, I'm really not sure why people keep suggesting X11-based DMs.
SDDM works fine when running on X, that's not the point, nor the goal.

Last edited by steve_v (Yesterday 18:56:03)

F_Sauce · Today 16:25:28

OK
The thing I discovered with wayland on KDE was that Chromium just froze, otherwise it felt fine (limited usage time).
I have an old GF760 NVIDIA card which I, for now, gave-up on installing the official driver on; thus, I use the free NOUVEAU-driver. The conclusion I briefly took is that there are some capabilities that wayland expect which nouveau can't fulfill and went with X.
The scenario above happened after upgrading to Excalibur, it used to work just fine before; the thing is that the support for the old gpu of mine have been dropped in Excalibur.

KDE, Wayland and official NVIDIA driver worked just fine before, can't remember any issues with kwin.

I don't know if pointing to the graphics (3d, acce..?) helps; anyhow, best of luck!

zapper · Today 18:49:12

@steve_v i have used console-tdm though and it worked for Hyperbola. The only reason I stopped using it was that I decided to use startx and then sx which is even more minimal

There are forks of console-tdm on github I think though and other such things similar.

I recommend looking in github for what you want.

And yes, screw wayland

Last edited by zapper (Today 18:50:03)

brocashelm · Today 19:42:30

No idea about a DM that doesn't suck eggs and swallow yolks, and couldn't care less about Wayland "usability". I just do everything from TTY, using this very antiquated command:

startx

greenjeans · Today 20:28:30

And yes, screw wayland

Lol, well we were all thinking it....

zapper · Today 20:51:01

@greenjeans also screw redhat above that x1000 for infecting linux with all sorts of bloated frameworks that no one should want or need.

wert · Today 20:53:08

hi. Drop linux console when boot.

Put some logic to /etc/profile to ask user, passsword and session then set some ENV accordingly,

launch there as that user. (may be as swiching another therminal)

EDIT: write some cookie to somewhere or set some ENV to prevent that logic don't always run.

Last edited by wert (Today 20:59:49)

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#1 2026-05-16 23:51:08

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

#2 2026-05-17 07:19:52

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

#3 2026-05-17 12:49:47

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

#4 2026-05-17 19:45:46

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

#5 2026-05-18 02:14:11

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

#6 2026-05-18 04:57:07

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

#7 2026-05-18 09:37:44

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

#8 2026-05-18 19:07:18

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

#9 Yesterday 18:12:51

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

#10 Yesterday 18:50:15

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

#11 Today 16:25:28

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

#12 Today 18:49:12

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

#13 Today 19:42:30

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

#14 Today 20:28:30

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

#15 Today 20:51:01

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

#16 Today 20:53:08

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

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