Re: New module proposal: LightDM

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 14:59 +0200, Robert Ancell wrote:
> I'm proposing LightDM [1] as a replacement for GDM.  I started the
> proposal for this in GNOME 3.0 [2] but due to the young age of the
> project I thought it better to wait until 3.2 before making a full
> proposal.  This is it.  I apologise this has been done after the
> proposal period.
> 
> Why replace GDM?

Personally I don't see why the greeter is all that important. Most
system these days are single-user setups like laptops. On such a machine
halting startup in the "middle" and waiting for a password to be entered
before continuing is pretty uselese, and its quite weird that the first
time you enter your password after startup looks completely different to
what is generally how you enter it later, at the unlock screen.

I think we should focus on automatic login into a locked session. There
are various issues here, like:

* Must add keyring unlocking to unlock screen
* keyrings are only availible once you're unlocked, which means some
things need to wait for some signal that the keyring is up before doing
stuff.
* Encrypted homedirs are problematic since we can't e.g. read the users
preferences before we unlock.
* Don't want to start autostart apps or start the session before we've
authenticated, as there might be security issues.

But, for a great many cases I believe this could be a superiour
experience. Turn computer on, type in password, and you're immediately
in a mostly loaded desktop environment.