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.
I guess I’ll stay on xfce.
The more I work with systemd, the more I like it. It just makes sense and it clicks in my head.
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.
I guess it’s not all doom and gloom, at least.
Yeah it’s just the login manager that requires systemd, not the rest of the DE
While it is a cool project, a release on Feburary is kind of crazy, that is so fast! I will try it a few months later (on NixOS which is 100% dependent on systemd as systemd is nice)
Did you know that Debian uses systemd but neither systemd-boot nor systemd-resolved? So you have an extremely shitty and slow boot and no DNS-over-TLS support. Amazing.
Good
