Why Are Linux Login Screens Called Display Managers??

Server — 30/09/2022 · 38 Comments



LightDM, SDDM, GDM, all of those provide Linux login screens but we call them Display Managers, why though? They don’t …

38 Comments

  6. i use this a lot for work, i got a "x" database client tool running on a server on the job network, and i can't connect to the database from my local pc with and without vpn but i can connect to this server with my database tool and i can use it as if it is on my local pc, it is really cool, and as i know this can*t be done on wayland

  9. The funny thing about display managers is that managing “displays” in one of the most painful things you can do with them (I watched the video, I know I’m mixing definitions, I’m just using this as an excuse to complain). Trying to get lightdm or sddm to show on the correct display, react to changes in available displays is not straightforward, certainly not normie friendly.

    Why do I need to jump though hoops to set the correct keyboard layout?

    I switched to using autologin with startx because honestly, getting a display manager to work properly is painful. Perhaps GDM with Gnome is better, but desktops and display managers need to talk to one another so that settings I change in my DE apply to the DM rather than their gui control panels missing most features you actually need.

    Appreciate for multiuser systems this might be an issue, but perhaps an apply globally button is needed.

  11. I only knew that $DISPLAY is what you use to connect server and client. Like "DISPLAY=:0.0". So if you are running secondary server (xephyr for example) you do it like "DISPLAY=:1 xterm". And that you can use url/ip address here(localhost:4).
    I've also seen xdm on screenshots.

  17. as i understand it, the situation is;

    it starts a xsession, hence it kinda manages x server ( which is a display server,) by controlling which parameters x server starts with, thus it magages display server, and it results in the name "display manager". so, the name kinda makes sense to me. "kinda"…

  18. to me display manager made sense even in modern times because, if you think of your desktop as the "display" then it's managing logins to those displays. It's not immediately obvious, but frankly, if someone is techie enough to even be aware of what a display manager is in their system, they won't have a hard time dealing with slightly obtuse phrasing, and since it is still relevant from a technical standpoint (for instance allowing you to launch entirely different display protocols like X11 or Wayland) I think it's a fine phrase.

  21. I use Archlinux and I can't find a way to keep my monitor alive when I logout back to Lightdm, SDDM or GDM. It keeps turning off by itself. I tried everything on the wiki, on the forums, etc. Nothing works.

    If someone has an idea what to do to fix it, let me know.

  26. I remember when I accidentally nuked my DM. I thought I had completely destroyed my install. But now, the idea of a DM just feels bizarre to me. That was the best moment of linux letting me break it I've had, learned something valuable.

  29. Final questions to viewer… all of the above :-). It sort of still makes sense if you keep in mind that a server is what serves (draws) the graphical output.

    I’m just glad I haven’t had to work out modelines from scratch for 24 years or so!

    Set up at uni was pretty lax in the 90s so it was easy to surprise fellow students by randomly changing their desktop root to hot pink for example :-). I did recently get to revisit some of this briefly with XQuartz on MacOS running an X app in a docker container

  30. The only reason I still use lightDM is because back in like 2013 or so, if you wanted to use the Xfce4 Screensaver (I believe it was still called Light-locker at the time) in a standalone Window Manager and want to have a lockscreen, you would need to have lightDM running since it would just leverage the use of lightDM to ask for a password to re-login back to your session. I pretty much kept a similar set-up since that time (other than moving from Openbox to awesome-wm) so I just kept lightDM around, even though (I think) the Xfce4 screensaver does not need lightDM anymore.

    Old habits die hard, I guess?
    or rather
    Can't teach an old dog new tricks? 😂

  34. I've wanted to do a remote X session between two machines for a while now, but the process has become such a niche that many distros just mark it as "unsupported" if they even mention it at all.
    And I can't find anything in terms of documentation that even explains how to do it on a modern version of X.
    I bet it works terribly for most software now, if it even works at all.

  37. I haven't used xdm in years, though I still have it installed on my system. I remember a time when turning on the caps lock would allow you to type all of the special characters from the number row without holding shift. I also remember using XPaint to draw various things up. Those were weird but fun times.

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