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Re: LXDM or Lightdm ?

 

Julien, just to clarify, LightDM uses 3.2Mb and LXDM 2.3 and not the other way around? This seems a trivial difference.

You've mentioned before that support is important for a DM as it needs to be tested across many different configurations. LightDM seems far more active than LXDM, and in spite of being newer you say it's already more complete.

I'd say go for the change - if there is a showstopper, or one gets introduced later, it should be relatively easy to revert. Also, if maintenance is being shared with Ubuntu (as opposed to being done by them), it should be possible to stop any issues being introduced that will negatively affect Lubuntu.

The main risk seems to be one of bloat as LightDM gets more heavily developed, but LightDM was launched with the purpose of supporting LXDE (although not exclusively, like LXDM), so I'd feel confident about switching.

--
Ian Gilfillan
www.greenman.co.za



On 09/06/2011 00:26, Yorvyk wrote:
On Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:39:42 +0200
Julien Lavergne<gilir@xxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:

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


I've been running Ubuntu Oneiric with lightdm for a while and it appears to behave it's self OK.
Having had a bit of a read about it I don't see an advantage in either, from a user's point of view, and I'm a bit lost with the technical (dis)advantages.
A few thoughts.  With the change to GTK3 and the potential problems to be resolved with that, are we adding another headache for the few competent devs we have.
Or would having Lightdm give us one less problem, as others in the Ubuntu community would be dealing with it and we wouldn't have to worry about lxdm either.
Would sticking with what we know be better as lxdm doesn't have any real problems and performs the function for which it is intended.




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