Whonix 15 was using lightdm. It was removed due to autologin heisenbug. [1] [2] [3]
Therefore Whonix 16 is using gdm3. It is also a good choice because it supports wayland (and fits with Gnome, which Whonix might be ported to, depending on many things such as feasibility, resource use, please use a dedicated forum thread (none might exist yet, see [4]).
Yet another option might be not using any display manager and instead use startx (or its wayland equivalent).
For that purpose RAM Adjusted Desktop Starter - Kicksecure (rads) could be modified.
(Whonix is based on Kicksecure.)
If no display manager is installed and if there is enough RAM and if startx is available, start it.
(Configurable.)
How about Whonix-Host?
(Would equally apply to Kicksecure host.)
Pre-configured style: Should have display manager and no default autologin? Also for logon password at every boot required.
Minimal style: autologin using startx by default. Display manager installation, logon password setup should be left to the user?
add accountservice to kicksecure-desktop-environment-essential-xfce
fixes:
localhost lightdm[911]: Error getting user list from org.freedesktop.Accounts: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Accounts was not provided by any .service files
For the Trixie port, we may want to consider a combination of greetd and an acceptable greeter such as wlgreet. greetd functions in a way somewhat similar to lightdm (separate display manager and greeter processes), but it’s quite a bit simpler, makes it very easy to use Wayland for the greeter (and for launched sessions), and works pretty well with read-only root filesystems (so far it doesn’t seem to need write access to anything in the root filesystem when used with wlgreet). There is a Qt-based greeter available for greetd as well, but unfortunately it is not available in Debian’s archives at the moment.
Compared to other popular greeters:
LightDM: Can use Wayland, but isn’t Qt-based if using Wayland via elephant-greeter. Seems to require write access to directories on the root filesystem.
SDDM: Can use Wayland, Qt-based. Directory requirements unknown. Whether this will be maintained in the future is unknown, since KDE has decided to make their own display manager to avoid needing SDDM due to SDDM’s limited (for KDE) feature set.
gdm: Can use Wayland. Isn’t Qt-based. Requires tons of GNOME stuff. Directory write access requirements unknown.
So far my only gripes with greetd (after having played with it briefly) are:
At least when used with wlgreet, it’s difficult to switch desktops. LightDM provided a drop-down box you could click to select your session and integrated with the xsessions and wayland-sessions mechanisms. greetd + wlgreet has a command hardcoded in a file that is executed as the authenticated user upon login, and that’s it. That’s plenty enough to start a Wayland session, but it’s lacking for users who want multiple desktops.
This might actually be a plus, since it means it’s impossible for a user to accidentally try to log into a sysmaint session in user mode, or vice versa. Whatever the system is set up to allow the user to do on login, that’s what they’ll be able to do, and nothing else.
wlgreet is not exactly the best-looking login greeter I’ve ever seen. It has some theming options (not a whole lot at first glance), but out of the box it looks like this:
wlgreet insists on installing Sway as a dependency, since it is a Wayland application and needs a Wayland compositor to run. We aren’t using Sway, we’re using labwc, but Sway is a hard dependency of wlgreet in Debian. If this bugged us too much, we could in theory write our own greetd greeter, which could use labwc, be Qt-based (written in Python), and look nice. (greetd uses what appears to be a painfully simple IPC protocol for greeters - it’s just length-prefixed JSON strings with a few simple-looking commands and responses. Writing a Python+Qt client for this would probably be relatively easy.)
We’ll consider that an advantage / acceptable limitation. And tell users on Other Desktop Environments about this and explain other display mangers can be used in that case.
