 As a long-time Linux user, I can say that my opinions on the software that I choose to use, it's evolved, it's changed over the years. Things that I used to like, I no longer like, things that I didn't think I would like, I've grown to love. And today I wanted to talk about login managers and specifically what I've kind of settled on as my login manager of choice these days, which is SDDM. Now, when I first switched to Linux, we had a lot more login managers to choose from. Login managers, sometimes they're called display managers, although I think that term is confusing. Display manager almost sounds like display server, which a display server or things like Xorg and Waylon, a display manager is the thing you use to log into your desktop environment. So I prefer to actually call it a login manager rather than a display manager because I think that's a much more descriptive term. I think it better describes what these programs are. And as someone that has strictly been a window manager user for my whole existence on Linux, you know, I've always kind of built my own desktop environment around my window managers. So I've always got to pick and choose my login manager. And I've used many over the years back in the day when I first started, one of the more popular ones for window manager users was a login manager called Slim. Slim even back then didn't see much development. And now you definitely don't want to install Slim and use it because it's been a dead project for more than a decade and there's a lot of bugs with it now. It's really not usable. I also use the old LXDM, the LXDE display manager, and that was really cool too. But that project has been abandoned for a while. LXDE, that desktop environment actually no longer exists anymore. These days, you really have two big display managers. You have GDM, which is the login manager that GNOME uses, and you have SDDM, which is the login manager that you typically see with plasma installations. Although SDDM, you can install it with any window manager or desktop environment you like. And one of the things about SDDM that I've grown to love is the theming. There are a ton of really sexy themes out there for SDDM. So today I just wanted to make a quick video showing you how to install SDDM as your login manager, how to enable it, and how to install some of the really beautiful themes out there for it. So let me switch over to my desktop and let me go ahead and open a terminal and zoom way in here. So let's assume that you don't have a display manager installed on your system just yet, or maybe you do have one, but it's not SDDM and you want to switch to SDDM, whatever the case may be. The very first thing you want to do is you want to install SDDM. So I would actually install SDDM here in Pac-Man. You would do Pac-Man dash capital S SDDM, of course Debian and Obuntu systems. You could probably do a sudo apt install SDDM. Hit enter, give it your sudo password. There's really no dependencies for SDDM. This is one of the things I love about this login manager. You see it's installing exactly one program, so it doesn't come with a bunch of stuff tied to it. Even though I mentioned it's the login manager for Plasma, it's not tied to Plasma in any way, which means it's perfect to install alongside a standalone window manager. So let's go ahead and install it. Let me clear the screen. Once you've installed SDDM, of course you can't just reboot your computer and SDDM launches. You actually have to enable SDDM as a startup service with system D. So to do that you would do sudo systemctl enable SDDM. And now that you've done that, you should be able to reboot and get SDDM to start up. So let's do a reboot here. So I rebooted the system and we get our login manager, SDDM. Now this looks very plain old school, you know. It would work. There's nothing wrong with using this particular theme for SDDM. But again this is kind of the default theme. It's what it falls back to. You're kind of expected to install custom themes. So that's what I'm going to do. Let me log back in. So let me pull up a web browser here. And this is a fresh VM here by the way. This is Arco Linux. I'm running. I installed DTOS on top of Arco Linux. And I'm going to do a search for Arch Linux. And really I just want archlinux.org the website here. And I'm going to go into the AUR because a lot of the custom themes for SDDM are going to be AUR packages. And I'm just going to do a search for SDDM. And let me zoom in way in here so hopefully you can see some of these packages. But again just go to archlinux.org, click on the AUR, do the search for SDDM. And you will have a ton of packages that involve the name SDDM-theme-some other description. So there are a lot of SDDM themes. And one of the ones I've been enjoying here recently is SDDM sugar dark. And let me show you this in action here. And I'm going to install this with Paroo because it's a AUR package. So we will use the AUR helper. I'll use Paroo dash capital S. And I'll do SDDM dash sugar. And I'll tab complete. If it will tab complete. And it gives us three different options. Sugar dash dark. And hit enter. And confirm the installation. And then give it your sudo password. Now just because we installed that theme doesn't mean that theme is enabled. If I were to quit out of Xmonad right now and get back to the login manager. You can see we're still just using the standard vanilla default SDDM theme. It didn't actually switch over to the sugar dark theme. So let me log back in. So there are some config files that you would need to edit. Actually you just need to edit one config file. One of the things that is kind of confusing with SDDM is it does have several config files in various places. For example, let me show you one of the places that you'd find a config. Is that user lib SDDM. Let me just tab complete there. SDDM.conf.ddefault.conf. This is a config file. It's got some stuff in it. And if I wanted to, I could set a current theme here. You can see current equals. That is a theme right now. It's not set to anything. And that's fine because there's another file on the system that kind of takes precedent over that file. So you might also find a config. It's SDDM.conf. And here is another kind of file with some settings, although I don't have anything that sets a theme here. It's possible I could, but I've got this theme section, but it never really sets a theme with that. What I found here on ArcoLinux is they have this file here at slash etsy slash SDDM.conf.d slash KDE underscore. It's not settings.backup. It's settings.conf. They have this config file. And this config file, you can see it actually does have a theme actually set. It's got multicolor dash SDDM theme that is actually not installed on this VM. So that is why that line right now is just defaulting back to the default SDDM theme. So we actually could change this to sugar dash dark is what I'm assuming that should be. So let's do sugar dash dark. I hope that is the correct name. There's only one way to find out. I forgot to open this with sudo privileges. So let me go back and do a sudo bang bang. Now give it the sudo password and now go down to the theme. Current equals and change that to sugar dash dark. Let's write and quit. That may not be the correct name. It looks like it was though. So I guessed correctly on that. So this is the sugar dark SDDM theme. And you can see it's very nice. You know, I got this little side panel here that's got all of your login stuff, you know, your fields to enter. And then of course you get a wallpaper here. And of course this is all editable because these themes, the individual SDDM themes themselves have config files. If I wanted to, I could find the line where it's finding this wallpaper and I could set that to any wallpaper I like. If I wanted to, I could go into the theme config file and I could change the coloring of this. And I've actually done that a little bit in the past with some of these themes. I've kind of edited them to actually fit, for example, some of my color schemes and things. So let me open a terminal. So once again to set the theme, make sure you go into this file here at slash etsy slash SDDM dot conf dot D slash KDE underscore settings dot conf. And you find the line that begins with the word current capital C current equals and then set it to the theme that you installed. Now you don't actually have to manually edit this config file. If you want, there are tools that will do this graphically for you where you just pick a theme that you have installed from a drop down menu. And on Arco Linux or any Arch Linux based system, you can actually install the Arch Linux tweak tool. This used to be called the Arco Linux tweak tool, but they've made it more of a generalized program for all Arch based systems. And if you don't actually have this tool, I'm pretty sure you could find it probably in the AUR. If I do paru dash s Arch Linux dash tweak, I'll just do TW and tab complete. Yeah, you can see Arch Linux tweak tool dash get looks like is the AUR package. So just install that. And once you have the Arch Linux tweak tool installed, you can just launch the tweak tool, give it your sudo password to launch it because a lot of what you're doing in here involves editing config files that require sudo privileges, of course. And then this particular tool, the Arch Linux tweak tool has a ton of customization options in it. But what we're interested in is login and then whatever login managers you happen to have installed, hopefully you'll have the options for them here. For me, I only have SDDM installed. But if I wanted to, there are tabs for light DM. It looks like light DM is not installed. Do I want to install it? So we have the options here to actually change out the login manager. But I'm going to go back to the SDDM tab here. And under SDDM, you will see theme and you will see the theme that's currently set Arch Linux simplicity. And then there's a few default themes here that just come with Arch Linux. But then I have sugar dash dark, which of course is the one that I manually added myself. And just set that hit apply settings. And now that is now my new theme. But maybe there's some other themes I wanted to try out. Why don't I do a paru dash s SDDM dash theme dash? There was some other sugar option. There was sugar candy, which I'm not exactly sure which theme that is. I don't think I've ever used it before, but let's install it and try it out. Because why not? Give it your sudo password there at the end to finish the installation. And now let me close the Arch Linux tweak tool. And let me restart the Arch Linux tweak tool. Just to make sure our new sugar candy theme is provided as an option in the menu. So now let me go to login SDDM theme. And now sugar candy. Let's take a look at it. So I'm going to hit apply settings. And now let's quit out of Xmonad to get back to the login manager. And it took a second for the new screen to actually load up. I have seen this. This is actually one of the default SDDM for Arch Linux. I didn't realize that was what they were using was the sugar candy package. So it's very similar to the sugar dark package. Except instead of having a dark panel, you have like this Gaussian blur effect, which is actually really nice. Kind of like a frosted glass, you know, over whatever wallpaper. And once again, you can go find the theme file for the individual themes and edit it. Let me show you how to do that. Let me log back in. So once again, let me open a terminal to find the themes that you've installed for SDDM. What you want to do is you want to CD into user share SDDM themes. And if you CD into that and do an LS, you can see there are all the current themes that we have installed. And if there was one I wanted to edit right now, we're using the sugar candy theme. Let me CD into sugar dash candy, do an LS. And these are the files for sugar candy. So this will include theme.conf, which is a config file. Main.qml, which is basically like a markup file. It contains some of the theming elements for cute and because SDDM is a cute application. And then you have backgrounds, which are going to be the default wallpaper that the theme is using. But again, you could change wallpapers if you wanted assets or probably some other images that the theme uses. But just to play around a little bit, let's do a sudo vm theme.conf just to see what's in here. And right away, probably the most important thing. A lot of people might want to change background equals and then the path to mountain.jpeg. Of course, you could change that to whatever you want. Looks like they're using a relative path. But if you wanted to, you of course could use an absolute path to any background image you have on your system. For example, just to verify that this works, I'm going to change this to slash user slash share slash backgrounds. I have a package installed called DTOS dash backgrounds that has some of my wallpapers. And one of them is 0310.jpeg. We have the option of dimming the background image right now and that's set to zero. Yeah, I don't really want to play with dimming the background image screen width, default screen width and screen height. Main color equals white. I'm assuming that's the foreground color. You could change the accent color as well. I'm not going to play with any of that right now. But again, you can see every theme is going to have one of these theme.coms. And it's going to have options for you to change things like the background image or the colors of some of the stuff. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and write and quit out of that. And let's go ahead and quit out of Xmonad. Go back to the login manager and see if we now have a new background image. So we should no longer see that mountain wallpaper. We should have a different wallpaper. And the wallpaper changed. This is one of the wallpapers from my wallpaper pack for DTOS. So that's a little bit of how you can play with SDDM, install different themes and then the individual themes themselves. You can edit to your heart's content, change the colors, change the colors of the fields, change the background images. And I'm really glad that I've moved away. I was using LightDM as my login manager. LightDM was nice because it didn't have a lot of dependencies, either no dependencies practically. It's what Ubuntu used when they were using the Unity desktop environment years ago. But when Ubuntu switched to GNOME, they then switched to GDM as their login manager. And really LightDM doesn't seem like anybody's really developing it these days. It doesn't see much activity. There's not a lot of themes for LightDM. A lot of the themes that are out there seem broken when I try to use them where SDDM. There's a million themes out there and they all look really good. And I know aesthetics really shouldn't matter that much, but it kind of does. When you sit down to your computer and you see this gorgeous login screen, does it kind of change the way you perceive your computer, the way you think about it? To me it does, right? When I see something that's a really sexy desktop, I just, no matter what, what's going on. If my operating system is buggy or things are crashing or whatever, if it looks good, then naturally I think higher of my software than if it was crashing and buggy all the time and it was ugly. You know, I'd have a completely different opinion. I know that's weird, but I really do think sexy software makes a difference. Now before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode, Dustin Gabe James, Matt Max and Michael Mitchell, Paul West, while you're ballin' on me, Alan Armoredragon, Chuck Commander, Rinkory, Diokai, Dylan Gregg, Marsh Trumber, Yon Alexander, Paul, Peace, Arch, and Vador, Polytech, Realiteats4less, Red Prophet, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at SDDM, it would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors, it's just me and you guys, the community, if you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like SDDM. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.