Auf Wiedersehen KDM

The first part of today’s headline is probably obvious to many of you.  KDE will be moving on from Xorg to Wayland.  And considering Gnome’s aggressive plans to move to it, this may happen sooner rather than later.  KDE & Gnome having a mutual interest in Wayland is great, and we can’t wait to reap the benefits of it.  But it seems that one technology — one that’s synonymous with KDE — will likely not be making the transition.

In a delightfully composed blog post by KDE’s Aaron Seigo, we learned of a late night meeting to determine the fate of KDM, the requirements of it’s replacement, and the overall future of login mechanisms for KDE.  The requirements are as follows.

• Must be lightweight. We want to use this on desktops and devices.
• Must be maintainable. (Self explanatory.)
• Must be able to write the user interface in QML.
• Must be able to be a Wayland system compositor.

In what came off as a dating show satire, Aaron had these words to say about KDM:

This contestant is a deep soul with much complexity who likes things the old-fashioned way. 20 year old scotch is its drink of choice, and it hates walks on the beach (not much of a romantic, you see). It holds advanced degrees in many traditional practices. Let’s say hello to .. KDM!

While at first KDM was revealed as a contender, its fate was revealed later in the post:

This is a difficult decision to make. KDM is not going to make the transition into a QML and Wayland world with us, despite it having served us well in the past. We need something to take its place, and we’d prefer not to start from scratch when there are good choices that already exist.

So it looks like the competition for KDM’s successor is a one-on-one duel between lightDM and SDDM.  Let’s not place any bets just yet, but if you’re using Kubuntu, you may already be accustomed to LightDM which seems to work amicably   But will it work well across every type of device that Plasma Workspaces 2 wishes to target?

SDDM

LightDM

Source | Aaron Seigo’s Blog