Choosing the Right Linux Login Manager
You can customize your login experience with a login manager of your choice! Here’s what that means and how to do it.
What’s a Login Manager?
A login manager, as the name suggests, is the software that handles your login experience. This experience is reflected in the functionality of your login screen, which then gives you access to your desktop. Specifically, it manages authentication and user sessions, starts your display server, and loads your desktop software.
Login managers are also known as display managers, which is very confusing since they are completely different in concept and functionality from the similarly named display servers. Check out our article on Wayland and display servers here.
Choose Your Login Manager
All mainstream operating systems ship with a default login manager.
Desktop environments also have their corresponding login managers. GNOME has GDM, and KDE has KDM.
There are other login managers as well, like SDDM and LightDM.
The login manager you choose depends on your personal preference! You may want to keep the default login manager and simply customize it according to your aesthetic preferences. On the other hand, you might want an entirely different feature set and appearance by switching to a different login manager.
Switching to a new login manager is quite simple. The packages and dependencies you need are most likely in your default repositories, so you can install them straight from there. Next, check the documentation for your distribution to figure out how to set a new default.
Skins and Theming
You most likely won’t like the default appearance of your login manager. But just like most elements in Linux, you can customize it to your heart’s desire!
Check your default repositories to see what skins and themes you can install through there! You can also have a look online to see what other users have designed. A great place to start is Pling. You can find and download a plethora of skins and themes not just for your login manager but for other elements of your system as well!
Currently, I’m using SDDM, which can be easily installed from Ubuntu’s default repositories. There are several themes that can be installed through the default repositories as well, such as Maya and Breeze; but my theme of choice is Sugar Candy, which you can download here!
Now, you can not only customize your desktop but also your login! Feel free to share your login manager setup below!
Read more about customizing Linux in our article here.
