said Carsten Haitzler: | On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:21:39 +0000 dep <d...@drippingwithirony.com> said: | > I realize that the terminology is tangled, with confusion between the | > window manager that we usually see directly only in the login screen | > -- sddm and the like -- and the windowing desktop managers -- gnome, | > kde, etc. -- but I'm asking about the former: does Enlightenment have | > its own window manager, that can be installed and used instead of one | > of the others? | | what you are asking about (i think) is the display manager (or login | manager). this just handles: | | 1. running a service that is always alive like any server (apache, sshd, | etc.) 2. this service starting up an xserver | 3. once x is up - displaying a login gui of some sort | 4. handling authentication of a user (give username and password or | whatever) 5. launching a new process (the login session) as the | authenticated user 6. when the login session ends, restarting x and | showing the login gui again
Exactly what I was asking about. There is some justified or unjustified sense that whatever it is called, it somehow lives under or in association with the desktop chosen and therefore choosing one that is particularlt sympatico with the desktop is in some way advantageous. Ie., GDM with Gnome, TDM with TDE. SDDM seems for some reason the default for at least Debian and works with anything. Is that belief -- that it matters -- justified? It may be due to a bug in one, or even just a coincidence, but I've encountered two issues: I have two big monitors, one above the other, which xrandr reads as one big screen of 1920x2160. With one DM, I don't remember which, it was not treated as such -- having to go off one side of one monitor to get to the other, while with SDDM it is just one big blob. I do not know, but did assume, that this was a function of the DM. If there is some continuing functioning of the DM, are there one or more that are better for use with Enlightenment? | of course authenticating could be anything from just simply switching to | a fixed named user with no password and never showing anything visible | at all. this is actually how most of my systems work - i just configured | slim to log in my user with no password. my systems never have any other | users on them so i don't care. if i want to lock down my session to only | allow me (ie need a password) enlightenment can do this itself: settings | -> screen -> screen lock -> lock on startup ... e will just start in | desktop lock mode and you have to authenticate to get past it. | | the login gui if not skipped can be anything from a simple "enter | user+password" to an elaborate user selector with complex authentication | mechanisms (fingerprints, 2fa things like smart cards, yubikeys and | more). it could also provide other handling like multi screen hotplug, | power management (battery monitoring) | suspend/resume/hibernate/shutdown/reboot handling, backlight | brightness/dimming handling and so on - so i guess a subset of what | enlightenment already does but in the login manager. so it's quite a | broad range of what could be offered here and different login managers | do things differently here. | | i'm skipping the whole "walyand session" handling here - it's slightly | different but mostly in broad strokes it's similar. | | there is an old go at making one of these called entrance - it uses EFL. | it's not really maintained: | | https://git.enlightenment.org/old/entrance Does it work? | on my long todo list: | | https://git.enlightenment.org/enlightenment/enlightenment/src/branch/mas |ter/TODO.md | | is "login manager mode" ... so basically enlightenment then also can be | its own login manager - just run it with its own system service handler | to spawn and it would start x itself and so on... That would indeed be cool, particularly on a machine that has only one desktop installed, such as one I'm building right now with Enlightenment in mind. Thanks for the very useful information. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/ _______________________________________________ enlightenment-users mailing list enlightenment-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-users
