cutefish-dm

The Cutefish display manager. It runs the login screen (cutefish-compositor --login) and the Wayland session the user picks, Cutefish or any other wayland-sessions entry such as GNOME or Plasma, with no black frame or console in between.

The login screen runs on VT1 and the session on VT2, so every handover is a switch between two VTs that are already drawing. On a single VT the console would flash whenever a compositor exits.

• cutefish-dm is the root daemon. The login screen talks to it over GREETD_SOCK with greetd's protocol; start_session may name a wayland-sessions id instead of a command.
• cutefish-dm-helper runs PAM and the session for one login, like greetd's session worker and sddm-helper.
• cutefish-session calls com.cutefish.DisplayManager.SwitchToGreeter before it logs out, so the login screen is already up when the session ends.

Dependencies

Qt 6.8 (Core, DBus, Network) and PAM; cutefish-compositor at runtime.

Build

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build

The Debian package creates the login screen's user; a source install needs it once:

sudo adduser --system --group --home /var/lib/cutefish-greeter cutefish-greeter

Enable

sudo systemctl disable sddm
sudo systemctl enable cutefish-dm

Optional settings go in /etc/cutefish-dm.conf; see daemon/config.cpp.

Tests

cmake -S . -B build -DBUILD_TESTING=ON
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure