A display manager is a program that provides graphical login capabilities for your Linux distribution. It manages user logins and graphic display servers and is used to start an X server session on the same or another computer.
LightDM is a popular display manager that is characterized by its ability to work with all desktop environments. It is a lightweight cross-desktop display manager designed to be simple, fast, secure, and flexible.
LightDM can use various front-ends called Greeters, a GUI that prompts the user for credentials to draw a User Interface. Additionally, LightDM supports different display technologies, including X11 and Wayland.
Recently, LightDM’s developers have finally launched LightDM 1.32, so let’s look at what’s changed.
LightDM 1.32 Highlights
The new version can overwrite existing X authority (.Xauthority) files to avoid corruption. These files are saved in the user’s home directory and are used to store credentials in cookies used by xauth for X session authentication.
As you may be aware, most desktop environments provide the ability to log in automatically without the need to enter a username and password. However, if we create a service account, we specify that it has no shell associated with it.
To address this, LightDM 1.32 now can block automatic logins for any accounts whose shell is set to nolign or false.
And now we come to something that has been long anticipated: the discontinuation of Qt 4 support. So, LightDM no longer supports it as of version 1.32.
Given that Qt 4 was released way back in 2005, with the latest update being Qt 4.8.7 LTS in 2011, this is an entirely expected decision by the LightDM developers.
Aside from the abovementioned changes, LightDM 1.32 contains a few minor but important bug fixes. The bug with greeters sending two login requests quickly has now been fixed. On top of that, this release fixes test failing issues when compiled with the --with-greeter-user parameter.
Lastly, LightDM 1.32 now includes an improved method of identifying whether the session being used is Wayland. This improvement is essential considering Wayland was growing in global use and is presented as the default display server in many Linux distributions.
You can refer to the official announcement for detailed information about all changes in LightDM 1.32.
