lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Julien Lavergne <gilir@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm a bit late for that, but it still time to discuss such topic.

LightDM [1] will be the next display manager for Ubuntu, and probably
Xubuntu (maybe Kubuntu also !). It will replace GDM which have a tight
dependency on GNOME.

LightDM has the advantage to split the greeter (the UI part) and the
core (which do all the black magic for users, consolkit etc ...). You
can build a greeter which use GTK only, Qt, Webkit etc ... It's also
heavily developed this cycle.

Last cycle I tested LightDM, but found that it was not ready. Also, LXDM
is now in a good shape. I tested it briefly on Oneiric, and it seems in
better shape now, and with RAM usage similar to LXDM (3.2 vs 2.3 Mb) 

To summarize :

Advantages:
* More complete than LXDM
* Maintenance shared with Ubuntu and Xubuntu
* Heavily developed

Disadvantages :
* New and less tested in Lubuntu than LXDM
* Dependant to Ubuntu team for changes : we are not free to modify the
DM, and it's possible that Ubuntu team introduce a change which
indirectly impact others flavors (remember Ubiquity changes for disk
requierement last cycle)

IMO, if items I mentioned at the UDS are managed by LightDM [2], we can
try to switch for this cycle. If later in the cycle we discover that
there are problems, we can still switch again to LXDM.

What do you think ?

Regards,
Julien Lavergne

[1] : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LightDM
[2] : https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-o-lightdm