KDE’s upcoming Plasma Login Manager will make its first official appearance in Plasma 6.6 (scheduled for release on February 17), explicitly designed as a successor to the long-standing SDDM, which has been used by KDE Plasma for years.
KDE developers have framed it as deeply integrated into the Plasma stack itself, with the goal of modernizing the login process by aligning it more closely with how Plasma sessions are actually started and managed, reducing historical complexity and duplicated logic that accumulated around SDDM.
However, it does come with a few limitations, ones that users of systemd-free Linux distributions or BSD systems likely won’t appreciate. Here’s what it’s all about.
I mean, there are other login managers ? XE can still use sddm with KDE plasma without any changes no?
To avoid any confusion, it’s important to emphasize that the lack of PLM support on systemd-free Linux distributions or BSD systems does not mean you can’t use the KDE Plasma desktop environment there. Plasma itself remains fully usable on those platforms.
I guess it’s not all doom and gloom, at least.
I don’t even use a login manager on my nixos plasma 6 build. I just don’t see a point/need for them when I can just login and start plasma via the tty just fine. And in many cases if you have multiple DE’s and WM’s installed like I do it’s actually better/easier to NOT have a login manager/display manager.
Yeah it’s just the login manager that requires systemd, not the rest of the DE
The more I work with systemd, the more I like it. It just makes sense and it clicks in my head.
Same here. I don’t understand this systemd hate
I agree, but tightly-coupling when it isn’t necessary is a sign of incompetence.
While it is a cool project, a release on Feburary is kind of crazy, that is so fast! I will try it a few months later (on NixOS which is 100% dependent on systemd as systemd is nice)
Did you know that Debian uses systemd but neither systemd-boot nor systemd-resolved? So you have an extremely shitty and slow boot and no DNS-over-TLS support. Amazing.
There is tooling in Debian to use systemd-boot, it even integrates into the upgrade process so that your boot menu always points to the current version of the kernel.
It is not default; you would need to bootstrap Debian yourself instead of using the installer, but it works. Bootstrapping opens additional possibilities like choosing btrfs on LUKS and suspend to disk. My previous Gentoo experience was very helpful.
Nice! That sounds cool, I struggled a lot with their default setup and even using BTRFS. Using ext4 and grub is painful
I guess I’ll stay on xfce.
Good
