LightDM is Back From The Dead, But Canonical isn’t in Charge Anymore
There’s something satisfying about watching a Linux project everyone assumed had quietly died come back with a fresh commit. It happens more often than people expect, and it’s usually worth celebrating when it does.
One of those revivals has been the return of LightDM, the display manager Canonical built more than a decade ago.
LightDM is alive
Released last week is LightDM 1.33.0, which rolls out a bunch of improvements as well as introduces the two new maintainers who are taking over. The last release, 1.32.0, came out way back in July 2022, marking a four-year gap in which the project barely went anywhere.
You see, LightDM’s original maintainer, Robert Ancell, had already called the project “essentially unmaintained,” and questions about its future eventually popped up on various forums over the years.
Luckily, two people willing to keep the project going stepped up, making it a community-maintained affair rather than a Canonical-maintained one.
Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa are both known for their work across a string of open source projects. Joshua leads Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, and Neal doesn’t really need an introduction; he has spent years contributing to Fedora, openSUSE, and CentOS.
As for what 1.33.0 actually delivers, the maintainers say its purpose is mainly to tag the fixes that piled up since 1.32.0 and clear out pull requests that had been sitting for years.
There are no breaking changes and no dependency changes, so existing LightDM setups should upgrade without any surprises. The biggest addition worth flagging is Qt6 support for the client library, though that doesn’t mean Qt5 is going anywhere. Greeters built on the older toolkit will keep working just fine.
There’s a long list of smaller fixes too. VNC server handling has been patched, the flood of log errors from missing PAM modules is gone, and a batch of multiseat and FreeBSD-specific bugs got cleared out.
Help is needed
If you didn’t know, LightDM is a lightweight, cross-desktop display manager. It’s the software behind your login screen, the one that authenticates you and hands things off to your desktop session once you’re in.
Canonical built LightDM to replace GDM, and it debuted back in Ubuntu 11.10 as the login screen behind Unity. Ubuntu itself moved back to GDM in 2017 when it dropped Unity for GNOME Shell, but LightDM never really went away.
Linux Mint adopted it that same year and pairs it with its own slick-greeter, and elementary OS runs it through Pantheon Greeter. Several Ubuntu flavors and Fedora spins still depend on it as well.
If you think you can help LightDM evolve into something more, then know that Joshua and Neal are looking for new contributors to join in. You can reach them directly over Matrix.
They also point out that signing the Canonical CLA is no longer required.
Though I have something more to add here.
Don’t unleash your army of clankers (I believe the formal term is ‘AI agents’) on this project; it’s already happening to many open source projects lately, and this one has just been revived. It doesn’t need to be inundated with hallucinations and pointless fixes.
The maintainers also request that anyone opening a pull request for a bug fix show a way to reproduce the problem first.
Source: It's FOSS