Allow switching UIs
It would be nice to have a convenient way to switch UIs. So far we have settled on lightdm as display manager, so being able to choose a display manager after the device booted should be possible with a custom greeter. My wishlist for that would look as follows:
- make it touch friendly (possibly use kirigami toolkit?)
- give it a nice postmarketOS style
- auto-login if there is only one UI installed
When we have that, I suggest to create a unified way to bring up the display manager from any UI: #134 (closed)
Activity
added help wanted label
mentioned in issue #88 (closed)
By Oliver Smith on 2019-07-18T20:57:33
Does lightdm allow to configure custom greeter?
By Alexey Min on 2019-07-18T21:30:33
Edited by Ghost User-
Yes. Here's a random greeter I found on github for example: https://github.com/prikhi/lightdm-mini-greeter
EDIT: or did I get your question wrong? I assumed that you meant: is it possible to program custom greeters for lightdm?
By Oliver Smith on 2019-07-18T21:31:05
Edited by Administrator
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Why autologin? Wouldn'it be better to have at least a sequence based lockscreen?
By Tito Ragusa on 2019-07-18T21:28:12
Edited by Ghost User -
Fair point. Autologin makes sense
- if full disk encryption (FDE) is enabled, because then the user has already typed in a password
- if the UI is asking the user to type in a password on startup (like phosh is doing it)
TBH I would go for always having autologin for now. Once we have that, we could figure out if we need to support a use case where people need to type in a password at the display manager stage at all, and if so, implement that as well.
By Oliver Smith on 2019-07-18T21:28:12
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If I understand it correctly even if you use FDE you will need a lockscreen mechanism be it xscreensaver or the like that looks (and behaves) the same as the initial login screen. People who want to use FDE probably would be happy to input their user passwd or lock sequence after the FDE password at device power on.
By Tito Ragusa on 2019-07-18T21:42:48
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Note that if we're going to use the Kirigami toolkit, it's probably better to use SDDM rather than LightDM. SDDM greeters are already built on QML, and Kirigami would be really easy to integrate there.
QML is quite easy actually, I might take a shot at this.
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-07-20T18:42:36
Edited by Ghost User -
Keep in mind, that SDDM is not in Alpine. I'd rather use lightdm and carry the maintenance effort together with Alpine, instead of introducing another display manager. Also, while lightdm has support for custom greeters, it does not seem to be the case for SDDM. So I would highly suggest to at least try making a custom greeter for lightdm first, and if that fails, maybe then look into SDDM.
(Maybe this is a good starting point? https://github.com/surlykke/qt-lightdm-greeter )
QML is quite easy actually, I might take a shot at this.
This would be awesome!
EDIT: last time I've checked, SDDM for Alpine was basically stuck here. Maybe it could work without consolekit, but still, we would have to port it first and then maintain it instead of just using the same display manager that is already supported by Alpine.
By Oliver Smith on 2019-07-20T18:44:19
Edited by Administrator -
SDDM is in Alpine, but it got disabled as I moved it to community while forgetting one of it's dependencies (I'm the maintainer for it). I currently have a patch out to fix it. I'm literally using it right now to log in to my laptop, it works fine.
I said QML is easy, I have no clue at all how to integrate it into LightDM.
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-07-21T20:06:57
Edited by Administrator
mentioned in issue #523 (closed)
By Dolphin von Chips on 2020-03-26T06:30:07
mentioned in issue #566 (closed)
By Antoine Fontaine on 2020-05-01T10:31:00
mentioned in merge request !1238 (merged)
By Bart Ribbers on 2020-05-25T08:35:36
mentioned in merge request !1630 (closed)
By Oliver Smith on 2020-10-10T20:03:06
