After investigating an unrelated issue, I was surprised to discover that my system was still using KDM instead of SDDM as the display manager. I just updated my configuration to fix this. However the switch introduces one problem:
My system was configured to enable automatic logins for my username. With KDM, the screen would instantly lock after logging in. With SDDM however, the screen does not automatically lock after an auto-login. Is there a way to fix this, and instruct KDE to immediately lock the session after the system logs in after booting while using SDDM?
I already looked in Configure Desktop - Workspace - Startup and Shutdown - Login Screen (SDDM). However the “Automatically lock screen on auto-login” option is gone. I assume there might be no easy solution, or this is a missing feature.
Uh… great. Might look at that workaround however, although using an environment variable sounds like an ugly and highly error prone hack. And I understand that SDDM is the successor to KDM for KDE, so it should be a default component now.
I changed it from /etc/sysconfig and am using SDDM now, no need for something as extreme as a fresh install. I do however usually expect upgrades to make these changes, so I need to know when I might need to interfere manually to keep an old install using the latest settings.
No meant if you upgrade setups don’t change so older stuff stays just gets bumped up versions if need be. So the point is to not assume an upgrade puts the machine in the exact same state as a fresh install. Depending on how many times you upgrade you can have some really old stuff lurking about. I always do a clean install. Reinstalling my software is a lot easier and faster then running down problems due to old stuff held over. I keep 2 root partitions and rotate them so I always have a fall back and don’t need to switch all to the new OS until I’m sure it runs OK