Linux what is my display manager

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using

In today’s article, we’re going to help you find out which display-manager you’re using. Your display-manager is an easy thing to change, but you should probably know which display-manager you’re using before you go about trying to change it. Either way, this article isn’t about changing your display-manager, it’s about finding out which one you’re using.

Sure, you could use a search engine and find out what the default display-manger is for your distro of choice, but where’s the fun in that? There are a few ways, some distro-specific, to find out which display-manager you’re using.

So, what is this ‘display-manager’? Well, a display-manager is often called a ‘login-manager’, and that’s actually a better name for it. It’s the (usually graphical) bit that shows up at the end of your boot process. It’s where you type in your username and password, and can sometimes make some other choices like keyboard layout.

The display-manager is a bit more than that, behind the scenes. It does things like manage authentication and manage user sessions. You can do all these things from the terminal, but your display-manager will let you do that graphically while not having to worry about anything deeper than that.

I guess it’s worth knowing which display-manager you’re using. After all, you might not want to change it, you might be having some issues with it and need to know which one you’re using so that you can start digging into solutions. I’m sure there are all sorts of reasons why you’d want to know this information. So, without further ado…

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using:

Like many other articles on this site, this one requires an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you have your terminal open, you can try one of the following (because this data is stored in different places on different distros):

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

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ubuntu display manager

Although there are numerous Display Manager (both GUI and CLI) available, but we would focus on three prominent ones – GDM, LightDM and SDDM. In Ubuntu, GDM has been the default Display Manager in Ubuntu 16.10 and later. Many Ubuntu flavors still prefer to choose LightDM as default display manager.

1. How do I find the display manager in Ubuntu?
2. What display manager does Ubuntu use?
3. Which Display Manager is best for Ubuntu?
4. Which is better SDDM or LightDM?
5. How do I find my Display Manager?
6. Which Display Manager is best?
7. What display manager does Ubuntu 18.04 use?
8. How do I find my default display manager?
9. How do I configure Display Manager?
10. What is the lightest Display Manager?
11. What is my display manager Linux?
12. Which display manager is better gdm3 or LightDM?

How do I find the display manager in Ubuntu?

Switch between LightDM and GDM in Ubuntu

On the next screen, you’ll see all the available display managers. Use tab to select your preferred one and then press enter, Once you have selected it, press tab to go to ok and press enter again. Restart the system and you will find your selected display manager at login.

What display manager does Ubuntu use?

LightDM is the display manager running in Ubuntu up to version 16.04 LTS. While it has been replaced by GDM in later Ubuntu releases, LightDM is still used by default in the latest release of several Ubuntu flavors.

Which Display Manager is best for Ubuntu?

• GDM3 is the default display manager for GNOME Desktop which manages the graphical display servers and user logins. .
• LightDM is developed by Canonical with no GNOME dependencies. .
• Ly is another lightweight Linux display manager and is tested for a large number of desktop environments.

Which is better SDDM or LightDM?

In the question“What is the best Linux Display Manager?” LightDM is ranked 2nd while SDDM is ranked 8th. . The most important reason people chose LightDM is: Some greeters such as the Unity Greeter look absolutely beautiful on LightDM.

How do I find my Display Manager?

wmctrl will show you the name of the windows manager. You may have to install it first. wmctrl supports a rich array of fun switches. These commands (except for echo $environment) all have man pages.

Which Display Manager is best?

• A display manager often referred as login manager is a graphical user interface you see when the boot process completes. .
• GNOME Display Manager 3 (GDM3) is the default diplsay manager for GNOME desktops and a successor to gdm.
• X Display Manager — XDM.

What display manager does Ubuntu 18.04 use?

Ubuntu’s LightDM login manager has been swapped out for GNOME’s GDM login manager, which means the login screen looks a little different, too. Despite the axing of Unity, Ubuntu’s desktop software remains largely the same. Ubuntu still includes Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice.

How do I find my default display manager?

If you installed other desktop environments in your system, then you may have different display managers. To change the default display manager, open terminal from system application launcher, and do following steps one by one. You may also run cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager to get the result.

How do I configure Display Manager?

1. Open Control Center > Boot.
2. Find Set up display manager.
3. Select the display manager you installed earlier.

What is the lightest Display Manager?

The lightest display manager I know of is CDM. It is certainly much lighter than SLiM, which everyone else is mentioning. CDM is in the AUR and to get it working all you do is install it, then disable whatever login manager you are using (that’s it: no need to enable CDM).

What is my display manager Linux?

In simple terms, a display manager is a program that provides graphical login capabilities for your Linux distribution. It controls the user sessions and manages user authentication. Display manager starts the display server and loads the desktop environment right after you enter your username and password.

Which display manager is better gdm3 or LightDM?

Ubuntu GNOME uses the gdm3, which is the default GNOME 3. x desktop environment greeter. As its name suggests LightDM is more lightweight than gdm3 and it’s also faster. . The default Slick Greeter in Ubuntu MATE 18.04 also uses LightDM under the hood.

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Linux Jargon Buster: What is Display Manager in Linux?

In simple terms, a display manager is a program that provides graphical login capabilities for your Linux distribution. It controls the user sessions and manages user authentication. Display manager starts the display server and loads the desktop environment right after you enter your username and password.

The display manager is often synonymous with the login screen. It is the visible part of it after all. However, the visible login screen, also called greeter, is only a part of the display manager.

As with various desktop environments and display servers, there are various display managers available as well. Let’s have a look at them.

Different display managers

Some people think of the display manager as part of the desktop environment but that’s not the case. It is a separate program.

A desktop environment may recommend a certain display manager but it doesn’t mean that it won’t work with some other display manager. If you ever installed more than one desktop environment in the same system, you might remember that a login screen (i.e., the display manager) allows you to switch the desktop environments.

Though the display manager is not part of the desktop environment, it is often developed by the same team as the desktop environment. It also becomes part of the identity of the desktop environment.

For example, the GNOME desktop environment develops GDM (GNOME Display Manager) and just by looking at the login screen, you would think of GNOME desktop environment.

Some popular display managers are:

• GDM (GNOME Display Manager): preferred by GNOME
• SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager): preferred by KDE
• LightDM: developed by Ubuntu for Unity desktop

Display managers can be customized

There are so many desktop environments available. Do they all have their own display managers? No, that’s not the case.

As I mentioned previously, the visible login screen is called a greeter. This greeter can be customized to change the looks of the login screen.

In fact, many distributions and/or desktop environments have written their own greeters to give users a login screen that resembles their brand.

For example, Mint’s Cinnamon desktop uses LightDM but has its own greeter to give it more Mint-like (or should I say Cinnamon-like) looks.

Take a look at Kali Linux’s login screen:

If you are into coding and tweaking, you can modify or code your own greeter as per your liking.

Changing display manager

You can change the display manager if you want. You need to install the display manager first. You’ll see the option to switch the display manager while installing.

If you didn’t do it initialy, then you can change the display manager by manually configuring it later. The method to reconfigure the display manager is slightly different for different distributions and not in the scope of this article.

I hope you have a slightly better understanding of the term “display manager” in Linux. The aim of this jargon buster series is to explain common Linux colloquial and technical terms in non-technical language without going into too much detail.

I welcome your comments and suggestion.

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Is there a simple linux command that will tell me what my display manager is?

Is there a simple linux command that will tell me what my display manager is? I’m using Xfce. Are different desktop environments usually affiliated with different display managers?

12 Answers 12

Unfortunately the configuration differs for each distribution:

Debian/Ubuntu

/etc/X11/default-display-manager 

RedHat & Fedora

OpenSuSe

/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager 

Suppose I don’t know what my display manager is and I want to find out by using terminal. How would I do that?

@ptrcao You would look into those files. Either opening them in your favorite editor, or just doing cat .

If you are using a systemd based distribution, this command will give the name of the display manger currently configured because you may have more than one display manager installed.

grep 'ExecStart=' /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service 

Output will be something like

Looks like I am using mint display manager.

If you’re using systemd, then

systemctl status display-manager 

Will display the name and status of the active display manager service on your machine.

There isn’t. The display manager is not necessarily related to anything else that’s running on the same X server. The display manager runs before you log in; it’s chosen by the system administrator. Everything else (window manager, session manager, desktop environment, …) is chosen by the user. There doesn’t even have to be a display manager: if you log in in text mode and start the GUI with startx , no display manager is involved.

You can check which display manager is the default one on your system. This will only give the right answer under some common but not universal assumptions. If you manually ran a different manager for whatever reason, this method won’t tell you.

A good bet is to find out the process ID of the X server: its parent process is probably a display manager, if there is one. This requires that your clients are running on the same machine as the X server. lsof /tmp/.X11-unix/X$ will show the X server process (assuming the X sockets live in /tmp/.X11-unix ).

x=$(lsof -F '' /tmp/.X11-unix/X0); x=$ ps -p $(ps -o ppid -p $x) 

(Explanation: lsof -F » prints output like p1234 . The -F option means a machine-parseable output format, and » means to only print the PID, with the letter p before it. x=$ strips off the initial letter p . The last line obtains the PID of the parent of the X server ( ps -o ppid -p $x ), and calls ps to show information about that parent process.)

Some distributions allow installing multiple display managers. There’ll only be a single one running unless you have a multiseat system though. To list all installed display manager packages under Debian and derivatives:

aptitude -F %p search '~i ~P^x-display-manager$' 

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