SDDM

SDDM, or Simple Desktop Display Manager, is a display manager for X11 and Wayland aiming to be fast, simple and beautiful. It is the recommended display manager for the KDE Plasma and LXQt desktop environments.

This page outlines the basic installation of SDDM, as well as some configuration options.

Installation

Begin by installing the sddm package:

# apk add sddm xorg-server-xephyr

Test the service to see if it launches and works, then enable the service to launch at boot:

# rc-service sddm start

(if it works)

# rc-update add sddm

Configuration

Under KDE, the appearance configuration tool can take care of some settings.

Manual configuration is possible too.

Themes

Themes for SDDM are located in /usr/share/sddm/themes/.

Users can set the theme in /etc/sddm.conf

Contents of /etc/sddm.conf

... [Theme] Current=''current_theme'' ...

Many themes can be found on GitHub under the the sddm-theme topic.

Copy a new theme folder to /usr/share/sddm/themes/ and activate it by changing Current= to the name of the folder.

Example

Given a folder containing a theme, my-new-theme.

Test your theme:

$ sddm-greeter --test-mode --theme my-new-theme/

If it looks as desire, copy it to the system themes folder:

# cp -r my-new-theme/ /usr/share/sddm/themes/

Edit the configuration file in /etc:

Contents of /etc/sddm.conf

... [Theme] Current=my-new-theme ...

Face icon / Avatar

The default (fallback) theme, as well as other themes, can show an avatar on the login screen.

This avatar can be set by renaming the desired image to ~/.face.icon

Troubleshooting

Shutdown / suspend / reboot buttons greyed out

Installing consolekit2 may solve this problem.

See also

• SDDM Wiki
• sddm.conf options