No More GDM in Ubuntu, Meet the new Log-in Manager: LightDM!

To be honest, I'm actually excited. Not of the fact that Canonical has decided to get rid of GDM (gnome display manager) but the idea and the capabilities behind LightDM. Have a look at the below screenshot of the current Ubuntu's Natty log-in screen which uses GDM.

GDM in Ubuntu

Then look the below screenshot of how the new proposed log-in manager called LightDM...

LightDM

These were created by a developer called Andrew and interestingly we just hear the same "repeated" words again and again from Ubuntu developers who tries to "prove" Gnome's inability to give them enough "room" to work with (fair enough :P). Andrew starts in his post concerning LightDM starts by saying...

One thing I found out I liked about LightDM is that you can pretty much create any type of ‘greeter’ you want. This got me thinking, if there weren’t any restrictions on what I could do (as there currently are with GDM), what would I do with the login screen?

Some even says that GDM currently has about 50,000 of codes while LightDM even after giving numerous features than GDM still god about 5000 of codes which may be helpful to fasten up the booting times. But just because GDM has 50,000 and LghtDM has 5,000 doesn't necessarily mean that GDM bad.

Although I'm not a programmer but LightDM is written using the Webkit framework (that's used by Mac OSX, it's an open-source project, not a GNU software) and when you write something using a framework, you don't have to built everything from the beginning and use the already existing functions which helps to reduce the code and + it helps to bring a standard which are among the main reasons behind a framework. So basically you can write a log-in manager using the already implemented "options" within the framework which helps to reduce the code.

But that's does not mean that the GTK+ toolkit (which is the toolkit for building GDM) is poorly designed. Anyhow, it should be pretty interesting what Gnome's developers say about GDM containing 10x time more codes than the LightDM.

The rest assured, this new LightDM "looks" fantastic!. Andrew has even created few videos... so I decided to put then in the post as well. So for all ya Ubuntu fans, nobody knows when it's gonna be available for Ubuntu Natty, but if everything goes according to plan, then it should be the default login manager in Ubuntu 11.10! nonetheless.

Searching within the Log-in manager...




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