Plasma Login Manager

Related articles
Display manager
KDE
From the
Plasma Login Manager upstream
page:
Plasma Login provides a
display manager
for KDE Plasma, forked from
SDDM
and with a new front-end providing a greeter, wallpaper plugin integration and System Settings module (
KCM
).
Installation
Install
the
plasma-login-manager
package.
Follow
Display manager#Loading the display manager
to start Plasma Login Manager at boot.
Tip
If migrating from SDDM, remember to
disable
sddm.service
first.
After completing the migration, you can also clean-up and delete the
sddm
user, which would no longer be used, with the command
userdel -r sddm
as the root user.
Configuration
After installation, a new section called
Login Screen
is added to the System Settings app, allowing it to be configured graphically.
To modify it manually, create a configuration file in
/etc/plasmalogin.conf
. Alternatively, drop configuration files in
/etc/plasmalogin.conf.d/
.
Custom wallpaper plugins
The KCM (System Settings module) for Plasma Login Manager may fail to list third-party or custom wallpaper plugins, even if they are correctly installed to
/usr/share/plasma/wallpapers/
.
To use a custom wallpaper plugin in this case: manually specify the plugin ID in the configuration file. Identify the plugin ID (folder name in
/usr/share/plasma/wallpapers/
or the
Id
field in the plugin's
metadata.json
file).
Edit
the configuration file as follows:
/etc/plasmalogin.conf
[Greeter]
WallpaperPluginId=
your.plugin.id
Save the file and log out or reboot to verify the changes.
Autologin
Plasma Login supports automatic login through its configuration file. For example:
/etc/plasmalogin.conf.d/autologin.conf
[Autologin]
User=john
Session=plasma.desktop
This configuration causes a KDE Plasma session to be started for user
john
when the system is booted. Available session types can be found in
/usr/share/xsessions/
for X and in
/usr/share/wayland-sessions/
for Wayland.
To automatically log in to KDE Plasma while simultaneously locking the session (e.g. to allow autostarted apps to warm up), see
KDE#Lock screen
.
Passwordless login
It is possible to configure Plasma Login to allow logging into some accounts without a password. This differs from automatic login in that the user still has to choose which account to log into, and it differs from simply setting the account password to the empty string in that it only allows interactive users to log in (and not, for example, remote users logged in via
SSH
).
Plasma Login goes through
PAM
so you have to create a Plasma Login configuration file
/etc/pam.d/plasmalogin
for PAM:
/etc/pam.d/plasmalogin
#%PAM-1.0
auth       sufficient   pam_succeed_if.so user ingroup nopasswdlogin
auth       include      system-login
account    include      system-login
session    include      system-login
password   include      system-login
In order to allow unlocking the KDE Plasma lock screen without a password, also create a KDE configuration file
/etc/pam.d/kde
for PAM:
/etc/pam.d/kde
#%PAM-1.0
auth       sufficient   pam_succeed_if.so user ingroup nopasswdlogin
auth       include      system-login
account    include      system-login
session    include      system-login
password   include      system-login
You must then also be part of the
nopasswdlogin
user group
to be able to login interactively without entering your password.
Unlock KDE Wallet automatically on login
See
KDE Wallet#Unlock KDE Wallet automatically on login
.
User icon (avatar)
Plasma Login Manager will access user avatars from
/var/lib/AccountsService/icons/
by default.  You can use the
Plasma System Settings > Users
menu to create an avatar, or copy your existing
.face.icon
to the directory:
# cp /home/
user
/.face.icon /var/lib/AccountsService/icons/
user
Tip
If you are migrating from SDDM and previously shared access to your avatar in you home directory with file ACLs, you should remove them:
$ setfacl -x u:sddm ~/.face.icon
$ setfacl -x u:sddm ~/
See also
Arch boot process
Category:Bootsplash
— for smoother transitions during boot sequences