Source: OSNews
KDE’s login manager, SDDM, has its share of problems, and as such, a number of KDE developers are working on replacement to fix many of these long-standing issues. So, what exactly is wrong with SDDM as it exists today?
With SDDM, power management is reinvented from scratch with bespoke configuration. We can’t integrate with Plasma’s network management, power management, volume controls, or brightness controls without reinventing them in the desktop-agnostic backend.
SDDM was already having to duplicate too much functionality we have in KDE, which was very frustrating when we’re left maintaining it.
↫ David Edmundson
On top of that, theming is also a big issue with SDDM, as it doesn’t adopt any of the existing Plasma themes, wallpapers, and so on, forcing users to manually makes thse changes for SDDM, and forcing theme developers to make custom themes just for SDDM instead of it just adopting Plasma’s settings. The new login manager they’re working on will instead make use of existing Plasma components and be brought up like Plasma itself, too.
For now, the SDDM replacement is roughly at feature parity with SDDM, but it’s by no means ready for widespread adoption by distributions or users. Developers interested in trying it out can do so, though, and as it mostly looks like the existing default SDDM setup, you won’t even notice anything in day-to-day use.
