From their repo:
Plasma Login
Plasma Login provides a display manager for KDE Plasma, forked from SDDM and with an new frontend providing a greeter, wallpaper plugin integration and System Settings module (KCM).
What we want
- Great out-of-box experience in multi-monitor and high DPI and HDR
- Keyboard layout switching
- Virtual keyboards
- Easy Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese (CJK) input
- Screen readers for blind people (which then means volume control)
- Remote (VNC/RDP) support from startup
- Deeper Plasma integration including:
- Display and keyboard brightness control
- Full power management
- Pairing trusted bluetooth devices
- Login to known Wi-Fi for remote LDAP
No built-in VPN support for remote desktop? 😢
Is this a joke or am I missing something? Why would you want that from a login manager? To me a VPN is either system-wide or per-user
RDP over VPN. My former workplace had a solution that hacked itself before the Windows’ login manager for remote logins. Would make Linux more viable for business imo.
And yes, it’s partly a critique; they put all those usecases and protocols in one tool (i’m a sucker for minimism and modularity) but missed this aspect?
I’m still not sure I understand why you can’t start the RDP and VPN daemons via systemd or other init?
So you say there’s no need for RDP in a display manager (login screen)?
I don’t see it, you can just make a system service that starts it on system startup. You can specify a dependency on the display manager being up if you’d like. But I don’t see why the DM itself needs to start it
Which is my point. 👍
This made me aware of this option in the first place. Just swapped it in on my desktop and it already feels less jank.
Great decision on Fedoras part. My laptop is running KDE fedora so can’t wait til it gets this update.
No AI? Are they allowed to do that? Are you sure?
- Types in username and password
“Perfect! You are now logged into your computer. Enjoy your desktop!”
- Nothing happens. Try to log in again
“You’re absolutely right, I failed to log you in while claiming you had actually logged in. Good catch! I’ll log you into your system now. Have fun!”
- Nothing happens
Made me laugh
I demand newly minted slop on every wake from suspend 😤
I demand a KoChauffeur+ button. How are we supposed to login to our computer without a
slopchatbox!?Already created a issue ticket /s
Feature request: AI password validator , because who needs central directory anyway
Letting AI decide if I entered the correct password is so much better than actually storing the passwords in an encrypted keychain (which can be hacked!!!). AI is revolutionizing security. This is the way of the future. /s
Very cool. I’m consistently impressed by the KDE devs.
Thank god SDDM is a nightmare
What’s bad about SDDM?
My biggest issue: no support for rdp
Pet peeve: In immutable distros you can’t change the background image… and I happen to strongly dislike Aurora’s artwork. I run Aurora on my work laptop, and my login screen looks like some kind of a bizarre childish acid trip. Embarrassing to say the least, but the distro itself is top notch.
Things I’ve run into:
-
Out of the box, the lock screen comes on after screen unblanking - late enough that when things aren’t snappy you can briefly catch the desktop without reauthing.
-
Sometimes randomly after wake, keyboard input is not recognized in the password field at all. Except for Esc, which in this state appears to crash-restart it and makes it work again
-
With a multi-monitor setup, I have still not been able to properly force the primary monitor. Is an issue because things like notifications and the login input will only show up on a usually turned off projector. This one might be PEBCAK.
I have issues 1 and 3 with XFCE on lightdm, too, though.
SDDM does lock screen? But that’s a screen locker’s job. In this case, you can likely disable it in some ssdm.conf and use any alternative locker instead (also note the List_of_applications/Security#Screen_lockers there).
I have the same multiple monitor issue. I have an ultrawide on display port, and a smaller monitor on hdmi. Boot messages default to the ultrawide but the login prompt also defaults to the secondary display. Minor thing I know, but irritating.
I’ve definitely noticed #2 and #3, very annoying! They should both show the same text input (not a straight display clone since they might be different resolutions/ratios)
On a side note, I’ve noticed some Linux installers don’t handle multiple screens well or high resolutions. I think Calamares is a big offender here, it doesn’t clone to every display so I end up stuck trying to use my sideways monitor. Or on a 4k screen everything is tiny for no reason, it should just default zoom on high resolution.
I much prefer the installers that are just a regular window on a normal desktop, where you can move it, maximize it, easily access the DPI settings and other system settings, browse the internet while it’s installing…
The lock screen and display manager are two separate pieces of software. The display manager runs before a user profile has been selected for graphical login, so it does not have access to your user desktop/display settings
there’s a button to apply Plasma settings to SDDM for this purpose, it prompts for admin password when you do it, which makes sense
Supposedly both the display manager and greeters have system-wide configuration for this purpose, however. And the issue with notifications and DE overlays are present post login, too.
-
It always chooses the default highest resolution, (which may not work on some devices with faulty EDID), does not respect the Wayland/X11 choice, has a long pause when going from login screen to desktop and does not support 24h clocks.
Just to name a few.
The first one I think is a fundamental limitation in that display preferences by default is per-user. Maybe this makes it work for you? https://feddit.online/post/1350756/comment/6636228
The 24h clock might be similar - check your system-wide locale.
has a long pause when going from login screen to desktop
Yea I have noticed this. It takes a long time to switch back as well when you lock the computer, logout, switch users, etc
meanwhile I just want to go back to blank/black lockscreen with no visual cues and you just type the password and nothing happens of it’s wrong, but I’ve been quite sick of trying to look up how to do forgotten things I had on older systems only to get AI slop guides that ramble on with a hallucinated life story and either never getting to the point of just not working.
I wish no visuals could just be a setting on all distros
Slim? Also, console/TUI display managers.
And you can usually restrict search results to up to 2023 to avoid AI slop. Also, i use this userscript to remove domains from results.
Edit: my bad, it’s about session locker.
slockcheck out Ly, its default is a black screen https://github.com/fairyglade/ly
No custom login theme now, or no theming ever? I will likely want to change a few things
Where are you getting this?
“The move replaces SDDM but means giving up on custom login themes.”
— It’s FOSS
AI hallucination probably
Could just mean that it will apply plasma’s theme
The internet is always right except when its not.
Fedora will be the first distro? Adopting it even faster than KDE Neon, a distro made by KDE itself?
KDE neon is really only a development platform, and it is barely maintained.
Ah, TIL. I just figured it was the KDE-est general-purpose distro.
But still, shouldn’t it at least have a development version of Plasma Login Manager sooner than any others, for testing?
it probably does, but it isnt considered a ‘real’ distro since it isnt suitable for non-development use (nor is it meant to be). its a very common misconception about KDE neon to think that since it’s the KDE branded one it must be the best general-purpose KDE distro.
thats why they are making KDE Linux. KDE Linux is going to be what a lot of people mistakenly take neon to be while also fulfilling the role of ‘development standard implementation/example implementation for distros to reference’ much better.
Did you look this up?
What do you think is more likely - that KDE Neon does not have a testing version of Plasma Login Manager or that a sensationalistic news headline is not giving you a 100% accurate and complete understanding?
KDE Linux will probably have it first.
Edit: nevermind. https://invent.kde.org/kde-linux/kde-linux/-/merge_requests/350
Damn. I wonder when this trickles down to CachyOS and Bazzite.
Quickly in Bazzite, not at all in Cachy since that’s based on Arch.
But you can choose your login manager on Arch, too.
And yet, Fedora changing their default login manager won’t affect Arch.
??? are you being serious? obviously fedorah isnt arch.
anyway, Cachy will have it the second KDE adds it to the plasma / kde-applications packages.
Yep, I’m being serious, Fedora’s decisions don’t affect Arch.
incredibly unhelpful
Why don’t you send me even more replies over the next few days, I’m sure that will be really helpful!
He’s not talking about fedora, he didn’t ask about if fedora’s changes would make it into cachy os but about the timeframe on how quickly the plasma login manager being a default for the plasma desktop environment on cachy os. Talk about whiffing right over the head, I think it must’ve been in orbit.
Sure, that was cleared up a couple hours ago when OP clarified as such. Since texture apparently wanted to argue (given his many comments posted long after the clarification), I thought I’d play along for him.
Duh, but now that this has replaced SDDM as the main login manager for plasma, Cachy will likely replace SDDM with it by default.
I guess that person didn’t know they could set it up themselves. Maybe they meant that it’s installed and configured automatically on new installs.
Due to how atomic works on bazzite the update for it will preconfigure it to work
they would still be totally wrong. it will be available for new installs the moment kde adds it to the plasma packages. their comment makes zero sense.
What kind of argument is that?
It’s already in AUR, you can install it right now if you want.
Right, but since it isn’t based on Fedora, which this post is about, what Fedora is doing has no bearing on what CachyOS uses as its defaults.
Except they responded to a post talking about an Arch-based distro, so Fedora isn’t relevant here.
“Trickles down” sure implies Fedora here, especially when Bazzite is mentioned.
Sorry for the confusion. When I said trickle down I meant from upstream KDE devs, not Fedora. I should have worded it better.
trickles down from the base kde packages. this is simple.
it appears they may not understand rolling release, or proper grammar to describe the situation, but theres an actual answer to their question, which is anything but “not at all”.
Fair enough!
In Bazzite it’s usually between same day and 24 hours, since the build process is fully automated.
Cachy already switched the default to it over a month ago in a beta ISO, but then they reverted it because it wasn’t stable.
looking forward to it, sddm is the only thing I have left that depends on xorg directly
You can set it to use Wayland!
it didn’t work for me when I tried it so I’m sitting out till the new thing is available
where are the screenshots
Asking the real questions!
Easy Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese (CJK) input
This reminds me of what a pain in the it was for me to get an IME working. I may not be smart, but even accounting for that, it was unnecessarily complicated.
bravo
