What is a Display manager?#

It’s basically a login screen. Why is it called a display manager? That’s a bit complicated for a shorter blog post so I’ll link you to a video by Brodie Robertson which explains it pretty well.

Ly#

Original project#

The original project is not maintained anymore. Which is pretty sad. I’ve been using it for a while now, mostly on my laptop as I reinstalled my desktop.

Why Ly?#

What made Ly stand apart from the other display managers was mostly the looks.

It looks as it’s running (and maybe is, I haven’t checked the source code) in a tty directly.

If you want to know more about tty

Today in Linux, the tty is a legacy name used to refer to the user interface for text-based input and output, otherwise known as a “terminal”.

It’s looks are simple yet they can’t be overlooked. And if you want some extra pop you can enable the PSX Doom fire animation which looks pretty neat.

It also loads fast and if X11 won’t start for whatever reason - you can see it’s output before it starts! Hopefully you won’t need that because fixing X11 is really painful.

For some people it may be also interesting as it is easy to setup without systemd.

Ly Reloaded#

Remember how I mentioned that Ly is not maintained anymore?

Well it now has a fork which is! So far it looks way more stable and has some new customization options as far as I know.

And for those who enjoy the PSX Doom fire animation, or cool animations in general, the new maintainer added another one! And you wouldn’t guess what animation it is…

It’s cmatrix, obviously!

I’m happy that a small, cool project finally got someone passionate, who understands it’s code, to work on it. It’s always good to see!