Changing to SDDM on SuperMario (Fedora 22)

Whenever I boot up post upgrade to Fedora 22, it takes much longer to load KDM than it used to. So I thought maybe it has something to do with Wayland and the fact that KDM is EOL’d. So I thought I’d convert to SDDM. I had no idea how to change DMs in the modern day, so I decided to look it up and ask on LinuxQuestions.org. Eventually, I found it on a stack overflow page:

systemctl stop kdm

systemctl disable kdm

systemctl enable sddm

systemctl start sddm

At first it wouldn’t load the greeter - and I think that was related to what I wrote about here and the default Fedora theme. Then I got it to load once and no users were there to select. Turns out that since I’ve been using Fedora for a long time, my UID was too low. It was only checking as low as 1000. So I changed the value in /etc/sddm.conf to have 500 as the minimum UID. After that….

It worked. The greeter had my name and I could type my password. It’d be nice if it could have my user image since I have that associated with KDE. It just shows a generic shadow-dude. I’ll have to look up how to change it. All the test images I’ve seen have cats for the user images. So it must be possible to change. I noticed somewhat less flickering when going from “Plymouth” to SDDM and from SDDM to Plasma desktop, but neither the greeter nor the Plasma desktop loaded any faster than usual. I have a decent processor (8 core KDE) and a good amount of RAM (8 GB) so I can only assume at this point that it’s my aging graphics card. I’m talking 5-10 minutes to get to a desktop I can do anything with. I’ve asked before and never gotten an answer - but if there’s a way to profile my login and see if some old program or helper I installed aeons ago is causing the issues, I’d love to use it.

• Sddm