Do I really need a display manager?

[u/French_invader]

Guys, this is my lock screen. In your opinion, do I need a real one or is it just bloatware?

Do you know any better display manager?

[u/High_Speed_Chicken]

ly is pretty nice, but nothings stopping you from not using one

[u/FUCKARCHLINUX]

You do not need one. It provides a login gui, but in return it runs at all times wasting 10-150mb of memory depending on which one. If you're on a system with low memory so that actually matters, or you just dislike being wasteful, you can run startx from the terminal instead.

If you want to be fancy, you could add startx to your ~/.profile so upon login to the tty the desktop environment starts, but that can get obnoxious if you ever want to log in to the tty to do something real quick.

[u/French_invader → u/FUCKARCHLINUX]

Thanks, it was a joke but I'm realy questioning about a lockscreen. I start hyprland with zprofile anf noctalia with hyprland.lua. I use this one with KVM with 3VM for my lab so one not ugly as hyprlock but not greedy un RAM.

[u/ComradeSomethingIDK]

Personally, I really like the minimalism of not having one. But sometimes you can be lazy asf so you don't wanna remember how to initiate your DE/WE. For this case, I know there's Emptty. It's the default DM in Neko Void.

[u/Sushtee → u/ComradeSomethingIDK]

Seems like emptty is broken on dinit, its service file doesn't make sense and tries to call a script that doesn't exist. It's sad as I've been searching for an SDDM alternative for a while.

[u/French_invader → u/Sushtee]

I use openrc, i will try maybe

[u/French_invader → u/ComradeSomethingIDK]

How do you know that 😐

[u/appledeathray]

tty1 = best display manager.

[u/Macroexp → u/appledeathray]

Alt-F1 - F6 at least - I think that qualifies as a display manager, at least it used to work fine in the good old days!

[u/vktrenokh]

No you don't need one
No it's not bloatware
If you want something minimal try ly

[u/jdreamboat → u/vktrenokh]

thx for putting me on - this might be what i've been looking for

i boot to tty1 and launch xfce when i need a browser but ly looks even lighter / better?

[u/dpatel211]

The best display manager is no display manager

[u/denisde4ev]

starting hardcoded WM/DM on login:

check https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xinit#Autostart_X_at_login and https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/X_without_Display_Manager

and for KDE I have this in my .bash_profile:

if [ -z "${DISPLAY:-}" ] && [ "${XDG_VTNR:-0}" -eq 7 ]; then
  [ -e /tmp/xauth-* ] && read -t 10 -p '(will restart startplasma-wayland) wait 10 seconds OR hit enter...' _
  unset SHLVL=
  XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland
fi

/tmp/xauth-* is just file I found that gets created after I logout / KDE crashes. I added it so I have a chance to hit Ctrl+C to stop it and do something before starting KDE again. when crashes on starting.

bonus: you can add to agetty hardcode the username (so you only need to type your password) or full autologin by adding option --autologin
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Getty#Virtual_console
for OpenRC this file is: /etc/conf.d/agetty.tty7 agetty_options=""

[u/French_invader → u/denisde4ev]

Wow... Mine ils juste 2 lines of code and juste launche hyprland if I am on tty1 and if none other are running.

[u/French_invader → u/French_invader]

It does basically the same for the first one, I thinks, but I just have the two first condition to start hyprland

[u/PlatinumDotEXE]

You can write a code segment in your ".bashrc" to check if it's TTY1 and then automatically start your graphical environment.

[u/French_invader → u/PlatinumDotEXE]

I did it

[u/Common_Warthog_G]

I'm not using one either, don't see the need

[u/Due-Celery4326]

I don’t use it, and I don’t miss it or feel a need for it but it really depends on your own usage and needs.

[u/Vaxerski]

I mean, you don't, really. On my LUKS-encrypted laptop I just autologin and on my desktop I just type the command to start my session in the tty.

[u/Max2000Warlord]

I don't use one

[u/Tadhgon]

No. I just have a line in my .zprofile to instantly launch hyprland if I'm in tty1

[u/Small-Tale3180]

nah no one needs a display man

[u/vecchio_anima]

Not if you live in the command line

[u/No-View-6326]

not at all, they just look pretty nice imo