I figured it out, I just needed dbus-service=true in lightdm.conf.
Once that setting was enabled, lightdm-gtk-greeter does support ayatana indicators and the ayatana-indicator-power battery icon displays normally.
It may be worth updating the old wiki transition page to indicate that it is indeed supported now!
Kat On 18.05.2026 04:28, Kat wrote:
Hello, I am attempting to use ayatana-indicator-power to show battery percent/status on the lightdm-gtk-greeter login page, but having trouble getting it to work. I am on debian stable/trixie. I found a page on the ayatana indicators transition for Debian, but the status for lightdm-gtk-greeter there has not been updated since 2018: https://wiki.debian.org/Ayatana/IndicatorsTransition#Package:_lightdm-gtk-greeter I would guess that, 8 years later, the transition is probably complete and that page just didn't get updated? After setting "indicators=power" in /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf , pstree shows that a process called ayatana-indicator-power is launched by systemd while I'm at the greeter screen. That process isn't launched without "indicators=power" in the config file, so looks like lightdm-gtk-greeter is trying to launch and use the ayatana indicator. But the indicator doesn't actually display on the lightdm-gtk-greeter login screen. Is this something that's supposed to work (if so, I'll put in a bug report)? Or are ayatana indicators still not officially supported by lightdm-gtk-greeter yet? Thanks, Kat
