I’m very excited to start off the Google Summer of Code blogging experience regarding the project I’m doing with my KDE mentors David Edmundson and Nate Graham.
What we’ll be trying to achieve this summer is have SDDM be more in sync with the Plasma desktop.
What does that mean? The essence of the problem is quite simple: you can customize Plasma to no end, yet the only thing you can customize in SDDM is the cursor theme. As a customization-loving user, this has been a big pet peeve of mine. In my attempts to work around the issue I’ve already went as far as adding one too many config points to the Breeze SDDM theme. So to finish that project and thereby solve our GSoC issue, perhaps we could just hook up the respective KCM’s UI to those options…
But that isn’t the right approach. We don’t want to be adding duplicates of already existing System Settings options. And that’s because the real issue is not customization, but rather consistency.
SDDM is currently one of the blockers in achieving a unified boot experience because it simply presumes theming options instead of having them synced with the desktop. When using Plasma defaults the problem is masked, but any sort of veering from them brings them to the surface. Our goal is then to have a way to neatly sync a chosen user’s settings with SDDM.
The settings that could be synced are:
- Color scheme
- Font
- Font sizes
- Font rendering
- Plasma theme (because that’s where the icons come from)
- Scaling
On top of that the goal of our project is to add support for Plasma wallpapers.
So that was a brief rundown on what we’ll be working on this summer, with more to come. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the login experience, be sure to check out the login screen redesign in the Plasma 5.16 beta!
Filip Fila's blog 
What i’m really missing are notification about undread email or upcomming events on the lock screen. Since this should be very easy to implement, i’m wondering why it’s not there yet. 🙂 Anyway, thak you for the great job!
Hi, that would really be nice, but SDDM is the login screen, not the lock screen. So, different project 🙂
I was about to suggest you open a feature request on KDE’s bugzilla but it turns out it’s already been proposed a few years ago, and it had some positive comments.
You might want to chime in:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343688
Cheers!
Great project! This may be beyond your scope, but another thing that could be synced is touchpad, mouse and keyboard settings. For example, I always enable tap to click and wish it would work in SDDM too. Similarly, I like to enable some XKB keyboard layout tweaks, but these don’t get carried over.
Cool! Best of luck in accomplishing this. Highly appreciated!