Suggestion - replace gdm with kdm as the default

[Tom Horsley]

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:57:43 -0700
Marc Wilson wrote:

> Really.  Describe this "rational" behavior, please.  What "configuration"
> does the login manager need?

You must not have started reading from the beginning of the thread.
The primary objection is from people who have lots of users defined.
The foolish, slavishly copied, windows login behavior of having a
GUI list of users to select from becomes hopelessly cumbersome, not
to mention slow to draw.

I only have one user and I find it cumbersome as well. If I click on
my name, it takes a fantastic amount of time (given that computers
are reputed to be faster than people) to redraw so I can start
typing in the password field. I have to pause and wait for it before
I can login.

The layout of the screen is also utterly foolish. The options to
select which kind of session to login as are way down on the bottom
of the screen, as far away from your eye line as they can get them,
and they don't even appear until you select a user, so unless you
somehow happen to search the screen for additional controls after
picking a user, but before logging in, you spend a lot of time being
frustrated that you can't change your login session because you
never even saw the $#@! hidden controls.

Then we really do get to the fact that it doesn't have knobs to
tweak. Once upon a time you could control the X server startup
options. If you wanted to remove the -nolisten tcp option, you
could do that, if you wanted to increase the debug level of the
information dumped to the X log file, you could do that, if you
wanted to set the -dpi option, you could do that.

Finally, to reinforce the "ugly" comments, if you don't
have any local users (all NIS, for instance), the login screen
consists of a dialog box that just says:

    Other...

What on earth does that mean?

And in order to achieve such a worthless behavior, the source
for gdm is something like umpteen million lines of code for
a gazillion interlocking programs which communicate via dbus.
How on earth could anyone make such a simple task so insanely
complex?