KDM plans and lightDM

Sebastian Kügler sebas at kde.org
Wed Jun 15 11:00:00 BST 2011


Hi Alex,

On Monday, June 13, 2011 21:10:36 Alex Fiestas wrote:
> Today something happened to me again, I turn on my laptop at the begining of
> a meeting and when I needed it the battery was over because the laptop
> didn't went to suspension (as I'm used).
> 
> That makes me wonder what are the plans for KDM in this and other regards
> since I haven't seen much activity on it (apart from bugfixing).
> 
> Also, since the last Ubuntu Development Summit I started to look into
> lightDM[1] as a possible alternative (at least for my use), I event managed
> to patch kdisplaymanager.cpp to play nice with it.
> 
> I'm not an expert on Display Managers so I can't really tell if lightDM is
> good enough (or will be good enough) to replace KDM. When I asked to some
> distribution people the first thing they told me is: "Does it support
> XDMCP?" and I don't know even what XDMCP is...
> 
> So, what are the plans for KDM? can we expect some power management
> integration? and plymouth?
> 
> For the experts: Does lightDM feel nice as a cross-desktop solution? is it
> good enough?

I don't think it's a solution to the problem. LightDM doesn't have any 
integration with powermanagement agents, so it doesn't solve the problem. Goes 
a bit like this:

- "Hm, KDM doesn't have power management support"
- "Let's think about LightDM then!"
- "LightDM doesn't have it either"

I think it's nice that someone's working on a replacement, but it seems to be 
kind of chicken-headed. What are the problems with KDM right now?

1 bit arcane UI, litlle themes
2 takes long to start
3 no PM integration
4 no touch input support

(Note that the above comes from the top of my head, possibly you can do even 
one or more, but the default roughly looks like the above. Correct me if I'm 
wrong, please.)

I think lightdm solves (2), but does so by cutting features, features which we 
probably need (some asked for XDMCP as an example). So lightDM might be useful 
for a specific situation where you need only the feature set that lightDM 
offers,

On the other hand, KDM is rock-stable, secure and maintained. It's not shiny, 
and hasn't been built with "devices" in mind. As a result, I'm quite 
skeptical. But let code decide, not assumptions.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9




More information about the kde-core-devel mailing list