Display Managers

They start a desktop graphical environment session.

At the minimum, there can be no display manager, and the session can be started manually from the console.

They also take care of the lock screen and logout screens.

The visible part of a display manager is called its greeter. The greeter can be customized to have different looks. Most desktop environments that don't ship their own display manager use a themed greeter for another display manager.

Examples

• GDM
• SDDM
• LightDM

LightDM has a set of greeters: lightdm-gtk-greeter, lightdm-unity-greeter, slick-greeter (fork of unity-greeter), lightdm-webkit2-greeter.

Resources

• How to write a greeter: https://web.archive.org/web/20210923235052/[https://www.mattfischer.com/blog/archives/5](https://web.archive.org/web/20210923235052/https://www.mattfischer.com/blog/archives/5)