I have seen some threads on reddit regarding this maybe few months ago but I revisited the repository but it still seems like mostly stagnant in terms of development. I guess it works fine for most use cases but there are a lot of Pull Requests open for years which have fixed many of the issues and also have been reviewed but not merged yet. And almost no response from maintainers on those issues and a new release since 2020.
I think we should consider an alternative if it is possible. I have been looking at greetd and it seems great and it already have a Qt frontend. So I don’t think anyone have to reinvent the wheel by making one from scratch. Anyway I don’t have much knowledge here but I have been looking into this lately. What do you guys think about it?
What makes you so certain that it’s stagnant? There are plenty of commits this year (including several members of KDE) and I heard they’re trying to push for a release soon. Stale issues/PRs are common for large software projects and SDDM is no exception, but that’s only if you look at the open PRs. Take a look at what’s been merged:
It’s easy to say “There are problems with $thing, we need to replace it”. But you actually need to find a replacement that fits all the requirements, and for SDDM so far nobody has come up with such an alternative
There are some of us that don’t use anything Gnome/Gtk related (in my case it’s just personal preference/taste, no animosity against those projects) and asking us to install GDM and all of its dependencies to use KDE seems a bit like a stretch.
I’d rather stick with (a git version of) SDDM.
But, like @Justin said, this feels more a distro/power user issue than a KDE issue.
I hate GTK with a passion, but I SDDM as it is doesn’t even provide much visual consistency with the rest of KDE—it’s just a Qt project, but not one that adheres well to the styles that Plasma sets—whilst sacrificing a fair bit of functionality and stability.
I suggested GDM because it’s never broken on me, whereas SDDM has. But if there’s another release happening soon, most of the pull requests I’m waiting to have merged might, so it won’t be a problem.
Here’s an example of a glitch that, according to a dash of research, is 10 years old and the only fixes are work arounds. This is on KDE Neon unstable. New install. Drivers or no. Can’t even hit enter after putting in the password. Dual screen overlap and trying to use the mouse on the little screen on the left.
SDDM is really buggy right now, is developed slowly, and I wish there was something that worked better with KDE. Sadly, there is no such thing. But it’s not much of a problem for something you see once per session until the KDE lock screen overtakes SDDMs job.
It’s probably worth mentioning that display managers in general are developed slowly. It sometimes takes years to get new releases even for the most active DMs (SDDM is technically one of the most active ones).
This would likely mean more contributions as it would allow KDE contributors who already work on it to work more freely on it, being on our own infrastructure.
