Why Are Linux Login Screens Called Display Managers??

LightDM, SDDM, GDM, all of those provide Linux login screens but we call them Display Managers, why though? They don't manage our screen shouldn't they be called login or session managers instead. Like everything involving X those is a 30 year old reason.
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X Login Screen: / why_do_we_call_that_lo...
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[@shanent5793]

Cloud computing: what once was old is new again

[@queerstudbroalex]

Never thought of the two as connected but yes spot on!

[@Cobalt-Inferno]

The people who wrote the code are very smart, but not great at communication.

[@AshtonSnapp]

Yeah that’s basically any person belonging to a technical profession.

[@fltfathin]

in their defence they are the pioneers when terms like mouse and keyboard is still slang instead of formal term

[@doublinx2]

A running trend with FOSS, unfortunately

[@leonidas14775]

Maybe it made sense 40 years ago

[@doublinx2]

@Zaydan Naufal True, and I hope that it's a sign for the future of beautiful, human friendly free software

[@denizkendirci]

as i understand it, the situation is; it starts a xsession, hence it kinda manages x server ( which is a display server,) by controlling which parameters x server starts with, thus it magages display server, and it results in the name "display manager". so, the name kinda makes sense to me. "kinda"...

[@anon_y_mousse]

I haven't used xdm in years, though I still have it installed on my system. I remember a time when turning on the caps lock would allow you to type all of the special characters from the number row without holding shift. I also remember using XPaint to draw various things up. Those were weird but fun times.

[@denoww9261]

gigachad programmer dvorak users still have the capslock number row functionality (although inverted)

[@____-pb1lg]

My caps lock does that idk what weird keyboard file i choose in my config xd

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@____-pb1lg Yeah, you can do it by choice now, but back when I got started using Linux the distro I was using would do it from the console unintentionally.

[@millsjonah]

I remember when I accidentally nuked my DM. I thought I had completely destroyed my install. But now, the idea of a DM just feels bizarre to me. That was the best moment of linux letting me break it I've had, learned something valuable.

[@robonator2945]

to me display manager made sense even in modern times because, if you think of your desktop as the "display" then it's managing logins to those displays. It's not immediately obvious, but frankly, if someone is techie enough to even be aware of what a display manager is in their system, they won't have a hard time dealing with slightly obtuse phrasing, and since it is still relevant from a technical standpoint (for instance allowing you to launch entirely different display protocols like X11 or Wayland) I think it's a fine phrase.

[@billeterk]

Final questions to viewer… all of the above :-). It sort of still makes sense if you keep in mind that a server is what serves (draws) the graphical output. I’m just glad I haven’t had to work out modelines from scratch for 24 years or so! Set up at uni was pretty lax in the 90s so it was easy to surprise fellow students by randomly changing their desktop root to hot pink for example :-). I did recently get to revisit some of this briefly with XQuartz on MacOS running an X app in a docker container

[@geekseek1935]

My god.. Thank you for making this video. I've been trying to figure out wtf a display manager actually was since I switched to linux last year.

[@l30n.marin3r0]

You needed a video for that? Can't use a web search engine and type: What is a window manager? What is a display manager? Serious question here

[@kj_sh604]

The only reason I still use lightDM is because back in like 2013 or so, if you wanted to use the Xfce4 Screensaver (I believe it was still called Light-locker at the time) in a standalone Window Manager and want to have a lockscreen, you would need to have lightDM running since it would just leverage the use of lightDM to ask for a password to re-login back to your session. I pretty much kept a similar set-up since that time (other than moving from Openbox to awesome-wm) so I just kept lightDM around, even though (I think) the Xfce4 screensaver does not need lightDM anymore. Old habits die hard, I guess? or rather Can't teach an old dog new tricks? 😂

[@VitisCZ]

Lightlocker still requires lightdm even today. For standalone WMs it's honestly probably one of the cleanest setups and i use it as well since all the other solutions of a DM with a separate screenlocker kinda suck since you can kill the screenlocker process and the desktop just unlocks since it's an application being shown as the topmost window

[@kdcadet]

I love the ability to do ssh -Y to run gui apps on a remote machine.

[@smorrow]

What about audio apps

[@kmemz]

I've wanted to do a remote X session between two machines for a while now, but the process has become such a niche that many distros just mark it as "unsupported" if they even mention it at all. And I can't find anything in terms of documentation that even explains how to do it on a modern version of X. I bet it works terribly for most software now, if it even works at all.

[@mskiptr]

I got that working about a year ago. The simplest (secure) way is to forward all the X11 traffic via an SSH tunnel, instead of the typical Unix socket. I vaguely remember that being just some TCP port on localhost being bound between the two machines, but I don't really remember how that worked. Still, modern GUI programs don't work with such setup well. The latencies on the internet mix very badly with how rendering is done nowadays. Also don't some X11 extensions make use of shared memory, which just doesn't work over the network.

[@omegaroguelp]

It does work, even without ssh, tho doing it securely is a bit harder to figure out, i havent gotten that working yet, you have xorg installed on both machines, and then on the machine without a screen you set the env variable DISPLAY to : where the display number usually is 0, and then it works!

[@l30n.marin3r0]

What do you even mean by remote x session? To start an X server from another device on any given device? To see the 'desktop' of any given device in another devices screen? To be able to interact with it?

[@etopowertwon]

I only knew that $DISPLAY is what you use to connect server and client. Like "DISPLAY=:0.0". So if you are running secondary server (xephyr for example) you do it like "DISPLAY=:1 xterm". And that you can use url/ip address here(localhost:4). I've also seen xdm on screenshots.

[@kendarr]

I love the little jokes on the board

[@solidhyrax]

Speaking of showing displays over network. I need to learn how to show a display via an ssh tunnel.

[@nevoyu]

I'm kinda glad I'm leaving X behind. Maybe we can rebrand display managers.

[@Tala2n]

Display manager always starts a DE or a WM. Agetty does a similar job except the graphics.

[@yrjo5050]

In start of the century I coded remotely with Xemacs on clients solaris server. But of course they got security consious and that fun ended.

[@e8root]

I never liked DMs and especially with their "kill it and it comes back" nature. For me it is normal startx (or whatever else) right from tty with running multiple similar sessions with the same or other users on different switchable tty's where Linux is at.

[@Jagi125]

Never thought about the name before, but I knew the context X was designed in.

[@Marvin-wi5gk]

exactly what I wanted to know, ty!

[@zeocamo]

4:22 back in the 70/80 they use firefox and brave ... OK Brodie ....that sound right

[@BrodieRobertson]

I could have just used foo and bar like every programmer example but I wanted real world applications

[@mrcat9697]

I like Brodie's videos by default

[@zeocamo]

i use this a lot for work, i got a "x" database client tool running on a server on the job network, and i can't connect to the database from my local pc with and without vpn but i can connect to this server with my database tool and i can use it as if it is on my local pc, it is really cool, and as i know this can*t be done on wayland

[@1DjFuzzion1]

I use Archlinux and I can't find a way to keep my monitor alive when I logout back to Lightdm, SDDM or GDM. It keeps turning off by itself. I tried everything on the wiki, on the forums, etc. Nothing works. If someone has an idea what to do to fix it, let me know.

[@sashimisub8536]

Maybe we can finally unify the look of display manager and lock screen with Wayland 😅

[@Keyshooter]

if we really think about it, we now still use just network terminals, since most stuff is now handle by the browser anyways

[@anon_y_mousse]

Especially with so many companies moving towards cloud computing and SaaS.

[@billeterk]

There’s a period swing between thin clients and fatter clients. Browsing is mostly on the thin side but the technology is obviously flexible with how much is run where these days!

[@billeterk]

Periodic

[@omegaroguelp]

I am actually using x over the network, i have programs running on a headless raspberry pi that only have a gui and the using a pc as the display for those

[@josipbroztito5519]

Brodie, the (king) of (KZbin)! I'm going to (join) your (channel) membership once one of the stupid (companies) hire me for a (job).

[@josipbroztito5519]

(I) can't code, and (am) poor, and am (not) smart, (but) I'll pay back all the (Linux) youtubers and devs once I get my job............

[@unfa00]

The mo' you know...

[@jamesb2877]

if you wont an good x server run bsd as the server or if you got the money then unix

[@umka7536]

Mainframes... :)

[@Aoitori365]

fedora's kernel is newer than what he is using

[@Hey-bz8is]

Remember xdmcp ?

[@epix4300]

Did you go the CRX?

[@notmyregret]

The more you know

[@itildude]

White board wins again. LOL, that's awesome.

[@majoryoshi]

They’re programmers, not english majors. If it were their way everyone would be writing in C

[@l30n.marin3r0]

What is even the point of these rants? "The thing that I don't like does this thing and the thing that I like is not popular! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH! T.T" You're channel in a nutshell

[@BrodieRobertson]

I see you've never watched one of my videos

[@l30n.marin3r0]

@@BrodieRobertson I have and that's all I can hear and then a whole of technical stuff but, what's the point really. "Alright then, I'm very much interested into how X works so today we're going to talk about x server and how linux displays shit on your screen!" I'd watch the shit out of a video like that.

[@tntredstone]

was that a joke at the start or are you just a psychopath