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Date:      Wed, 15 Mar 2017 15:36:39 +0100
From:      Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@rocketmail.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: about display managers...
Message-ID:  <20170315153639.47ea59f7@archlinux.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <1e7c8769-36e1-fc80-d897-484b9468a605@uni-dortmund.de>
References:  <1e7c8769-36e1-fc80-d897-484b9468a605@uni-dortmund.de>

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On Wed, 15 Mar 2017 15:12:08 +0100, Christian Baer wrote:
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>Greetings programs!
>
>I am setting up a new laptop here and doing things a little
>differently. The past machines I set up all had KDE4, which I learned
>to regret[1]. I'm trying to do things a little differently.
>
>Because I like to play with different WM and desktops, I have installed
>Lumina, Xfce and Openbox - there might be more.  But there is the
>thing about the DM. On Opensuse Leap I can install KDM5 (which I
>actually do like) as a separate package (with very little KDE clutter).
>FreeBSD doesn't have it as a separate package, so I'd have to install
>KDE completely - which I am trying to avoid. Strangely, GDM is there as
>a separate package, but since it wants to install the current Gnome3
>(~950MB), I won't go down that road either. XDM works but looks like
>it's stuck in the early 90s.
>
>I have heard of other display managers, but I can't really say I have
>used any. And unfortunately, the term "display manager" in duckduckgo
>and others give me a ton of stuff that actually involves displays (as
>in hardware). So that wasn't too helpful either.
>
>Can someone recommend a DM[2], that can be installed under FreeBSD
>(without having to install a complete desktop along side it),
>preferably one that looks modern attractive (customers will see this
>laptop) and makes changing between desktops nice and simple?

DMs could have different greeters and themes, perhaps you should google
for "freebsd name_of_a_DM greeter". The DMs as well as the greeters
could have configuration files where you could change the appearance.

One DM you didn't mention is "lightdm". I don't know how good it's
maintained for FreeBSD, but there at least seemingly is a port for it
and a gtk-greeter.

https://www.freshports.org/x11/lightdm
https://www.freshports.org/x11/lightdm-gtk-greeter/

When installing "equal" DMs from different Linux distros' official
repositories, I noticed that they are not always equal to configure, so
if you build for FreeBSD, you might need care about options when
building the DM.

Regards,
Ralf



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