KDE's new Plasma Login Manager is tightly bound to systemd

Title makes it sound like you won't be able to run KDE Plasma on *BSD or minimal/obscure Linux distros, so I feel like it's worth quoting the bottom of the post for completeness sake:

> 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.

> In other words, for those users, the situation remains unchanged. On their systems, Plasma will continue to rely on SDDM or other platform-specific startup mechanisms, with no indication from KDE that PLM will be made portable beyond systemd environments.

Graphical login managers are just a nightmare altogether.

Genuine use cases for multiuser desktop Linux are exceedingly rare. (Are university computer labs with desktop computers still a thing? Or is it just Wi-Fi and BYOD now?)

On an effectively-single-user system, there is very little point in distinguishing between the state where the single user has logged in and the session has been locked versus the state where the single user has not yet logged in. Dealing with the discontinuities between those two states, on the other hand, is a nightmare. (e.g. Wi-Fi might be controlled through the desktop session. Why should the computer not be connected to Wi-Fi and its network services reachable, just because the user hasn't logged in yet? What about power management? If the single user has turned off the feature to automatically suspend after x minutes of inactivity through KDE settings, why should that setting only start to apply after the user has logged in, and not yet when the greeter is still sitting idle? Those kinds of behaviours are usually not what you want) -- And, subjectively, I've found the KDE login manager to be the buggiest part of my KDE experience anyway.

I would advise anyone to set up auto login with something like sddm, and skip the whole thing. Password entry is a bit redundant, assuming the user has already entered at least one password for disk encryption, and things like ssh are governed through key pairs.

Can someone explain why SystemD was controversial in the first place? I just saw faster boot times when distros adopted it.

Can KDE function without it, using e.g. lightdm? If so, not a big deal.

It's worth noting that all of this drama stems from the (somewhat opaque, to put it nicely) reddit comments of one KDE developer, so that warrants treating it as a rumor in my book.

It would be prudent to wait for an announcement or clarification from KDE leadership before assuming anything one way or the other.

I worked on both Linux login process, SDDM and LightDM in the past. The process is complex to put it mildly.

While PAM is a relatively straightforward system, interfacing with it and handling what it says is a bit backwards and complex (e.g.: Try to handle and relay LDAP password policy warnings to the user while in the login screen, and you'll have a fun time).

While I don't like systemd, I can understand why KDE devs want to integrate with it, esp. if doing so simplifies their life and reduces the number of edge cases.

Also, last but not the least, a KDE session is a complex beast. KDE overrides almost half of the environment it inherits to realize what the user has requested via System Settings (locales, esp.).

So this is why I don't condone, but understand what they did.

...and yes, as everyone said, KDE will work with any login manager.

I didn't install a login manager. I login to console and run startplasma-wayland if I want a gui.

I'm not sure I'm missing anything.

I hope there can be ways to circumvent this limitation and make it usable on non-systemd installs, i.e. with elogind (systemd's "logind extracted out to be a standalone daemon") https://github.com/elogind/elogind

Gentoo already has elogind which mimics the necessary systemd facilities... surely that could be used on other distros/OSes to support PLM as well.

Sounds like a dependency. Not a particularly new issue in software.

sYsTemD, WaYlAnD and PiPeWiRe

ThAnkS rEd HaT, EU fUndS WelL SpEnT

tl;dr: this is a new login manager. Nothing is changing for existing login managers.

So you can continue to use KDE Plasma on alternative init daemons / non-Linux OSs like before.

KDE's decision to move toward only supporting systemD systems is a real loss and saddens me. KDE has been my favorite DE for years. I guess all good things come to an end, though.