KDE’s upcoming Plasma Login Manager will make its first official appearance in Plasma 6.6 (scheduled for release on February 17), explicitly designed as a successor to the long-standing SDDM, which has been used by KDE Plasma for years.
KDE developers have framed it as deeply integrated into the Plasma stack itself, with the goal of modernizing the login process by aligning it more closely with how Plasma sessions are actually started and managed, reducing historical complexity and duplicated logic that accumulated around SDDM.
However, it does come with a few limitations, ones that users of systemd-free Linux distributions or BSD systems likely won’t appreciate. Here’s what it’s all about.
PLM is strictly systemd-native, relying on systemd-logind and systemd user services for session lifecycle management, permissions, and seat handling. These are hard dependencies, not optional features, and they form the foundation of the new login manager.
Because of this, systemd-free Linux distributions cannot use Plasma Login Manager, and the same applies to all BSD operating systems, which lack systemd entirely and have no compatible substitute for the APIs PLM depends on. As one of the KDE developers commented on Reddit:
“At the end of the day, we don’t ideally want to cut support for the BSDs and other niche distros, but we also don’t want to hold back on making the best experience possible for the majority user base.”
To avoid any confusion, it’s important to emphasize that the lack of PLM support on systemd-free Linux distributions or BSD systems does not mean you can’t use the KDE Plasma desktop environment there. Plasma itself remains fully usable on those platforms.
In other words, for those users, the situation remains unchanged. On their systems, Plasma will continue to rely on SDDM or other platform-specific startup mechanisms, with no indication from KDE that PLM will be made portable beyond systemd environments.
Great news!!! Why would KDE even consider using anything else?
Systemd just does what it needs to do and stays out of the way otherwise.
I’ve never had anything but extremely positive experiences with systemd.
I use KDE Plasma on Void linux wich use runit instead of systemd. Plasma will still be startable from console with “startplasma-wayland” or “startplasma-x11”. You will be able to use any other non-systemd dependant display-manager: sddm, gdm (?), …
Next step is getting vital kde parts systemd dependant… Then switch to another non-systemd dependant window manager : Hyprland, niri, labwc, qtile, …
Guess you have to use .xinitrc and startx to not the desktop. I use sddm on a sysvinit system (linux from scratch)….I HAAAAAAAAAAATE systemd
But why?
But why?
You can also use gdm as i do cuurently to login andcstart kde
I do this becausec sddm is very buggy and gdm is rock solid, and much faster getting
Started.
You’re buying yourself time. Gdm is a Red Hat product, like systemd, and Gnome’s (another Red Hat project) been relying ever more deeply on systemd lately. Plus, Gdm is absolute garbage compared to other greeters.
While systemd the named init system may be a redhat initiated project, it is based on the start up system that sun microsystems created with the switch from 4.2 bsd sunos to sys5r4 solaris. The admin commands and config files are very simular enough that once you got one the copy ie systemd comes second nature. Suns version was first introduced in around 1990 to 1991. Its called smf
My only question, can the login manager be removed and use old way of doing a command line log-in. VIA startx or other in use command.
I would assume so. You won’t be able to use startx since KDE is going Wayland only (along with most of the world), but I imagine you can invoke it with its own command like COSMIC.
In my system (Fedora KDE 43) I have startplasma-wayland which I believe is what one would use as a replacement for startx.
There’s also startplasma which might be a generic wrapper.
Please, is ao boring reading about “systemd-free” distros. If a distro use, i.e. the System V boot process, please, name it that way. If you want to name all systems that don’t use systemd, say that: i.e. distros without systemd.
Let’s welcome everyone who escaped the Microsoft world to the new order of IBM Red Hat.
Exactly.
I don’t see any difference between the evil Microsoft of then and the absolute toxicity of the Red Hat of now.
They are doing everything (and I mean everything, defacing, discrediting, paying trolls, throwing millions of bots) to control the Linux world and influence negatively everything that is not their NIH half-ǎssed garbage. And when people don’t really adopt their garbage products, like wayland, they force themselves into Xorg and controlling it (like they did over the years) before making it unusable, stop its development and do the nastiest stuff to competing projects (like Xlibre), to make sure their own solution will be adopted.
It’s pathetic that a Billion $ company needs to force push their project to be adopted, because no one buys into their garbage, or see through them and drop everything related to them (like System76 with Cosmic, or Budgie dropping Gtk and the Gnome bits it was using). Red Hat is turning into a huge failure of a company. And it’s not just due to IBM, it started about the same time with Gnome 3, wayland or systemd. I am in the process of dropping systemd and as many things Red Hat as possible. And I feel so much better for it.
I am willing to go back a few years in the past with less convenient software if that means dropping anything Red Hat and leaping towards a future with better engineered and designed software than the garbage they try to lock us in.
Unfortunately, Red Hat is another Microsoft doing the same thing if you look at Fedora. They want a proprietary ecosystem even if it’s based on FOSS. Just because FOSS exists doesn’t mean an environment can’t be proprietary. Systemd, wayland, pipewire, libinput, Gnome, wayland… Welcome to Microsoft 2.0 aka IBM/Red Hat.
Good luck now with escaping this to FreeBSD because they’re effectively trying to kill everything but systemd-Linux, and using FOSS to boot.
So I should use System V instead SystemD. Is that your point?
So I cannot use this new tool because I use FreeBSD. Is that your point? is this portability? is this how software should be created? Is this the reason people get away from monopolies? JC Karl … wake up.
You think that packages having dependencies is like Microsoft’s monopoly lol?