What do you guys think about dropping SDDM as default desplay manager for KDE 6?

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?

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I didn’t know SDDM was broken

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:

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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

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@nicolasfella, is GDM unviable?

Issues aside, the display manager is chosen by the OS, not KDE.

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Hi @rokejulianlockhart!

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.