SIGs/KDE/KDMtoLightDM

Switching from KDM to LightDM login manager

As it is possible to compile kde-workspace without KDM using a cmake parameter [1], we can replace the default KDE login manager (KDM) with others, namely LightDM that has improved its KDE support dramatically lately.

Pro:

• Smaller code base
• Better performance (according to their presentation, my experince so far is not that great - mbriza) and "light"
  • I just tested this in Fedora 18 and I'm quite skeptical regarding this as booting the system with KDM took about 730MB of RAM and with LightDM it was 770MB
• Simpler API for creating greeters
• Powermanagement is present
  • Although it is present, is it really a pro as we'll be adding an other powermanager separated from PowerDevil? The settings would differ or would need to be propagated
• Multi-head support is better - Prompt is displayed on the screen where the mouse cursor is

Con:

• Switching users in KDE is not possible. [2]
• Dependency on glib

What needs to be done:

• Add the conditional KDM inclusion parameter to kde-workspace
• Edit kde-settings not to ship KDM settings

Links

• http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/LightDM official web
• http://www.sharpley.org.uk/node contains release info and interesting discussions (unfortunately there are no tags to filter the articles)
• http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=130799230315640 a quite lenghty thread comparing KDM to LightDM in the KDE-core-devel mailing list
• http://mjg59.livejournal.com/136274.html An article describing why it maybe is not such a good idea to switch to LightDM