Better prepare for some alternative distro as well. SUSE doesn’t do a DE anymore, GNOME is already full Wayland, KDE’s Plasma is going to be before the end of the year, XFCE devs see the demise of X11 coming and put all efforts on getting Wayland-ready, there won’t be any need for X11 for Leap 16.( maybe 3 or 4 ). That would release openSUSE from the burden of maintaiining X11 packages which we actually simply don’t have contributors for, so your bets are on a herd of dead horses.
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I had the thought – “from where” → it’s currently being built here (in a Branch … ) → <Branch project for package plasma6-login-manager>
But, there’s a “fly in the soup” → ArchWiki → <Keyboard layout>
Plasma Login Manager will use (at the moment) the X11 Layout, default is “us”.
> localectl
System Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8
VC Keymap: de-nodeadkeys
X11 Layout: de
X11 Model: cymotionlinux
X11 Variant: nodeadkeys
X11 Options: terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
>
Yeah, I branched it myself as well, I want to make sure the original source is used.
SDDM also defaults to the US keyboard layout after a fresh installation, which I consider a major nuisance, it should honor the layout you select during installation.
When I switched from SDDM to PLM, it kept my German keyboard layout.
Ah, well, OK. Before I had my configuration of Xfce (Wayland) on greetd (gtkgreet), I testet some this and that for DE and DM. And I actually wondered why I didn’t get de_DE. At that moment, I thought I had something mis-installed or mis-configured…
It’s a known issue upstream, as the core of PLM is based on sddm, and it’s being worked on.
I have no clue how X11 handles this, as I haven’t used X11 in years, but for sddm-wayland anyway, with kwin as the compositor, the following line in the sddm config will pick up your keyboard layout, from what I understand (and has been reported as successful for Kalpa users with non-US keyboards anyway)
[Wayland]
CompositorCommand=kwin_wayland --no-lockscreen --no-global-shortcuts --locale1
I don’t know if that works with PLM, but it probably should??
The success measurement of openSUSE is that you never see DM/login. Some users can’t afford to ever see it. I don’t really pay attention to anything you should only see for 15 secs once a month or so.
tom kosvic
I firmly disagree there, was shocked when the YaST installer suddenly had autologin as an opt-out. People should see a login screen and enter their password IMNSHO. Also for sceen unlocking,
Small story: My dad’s cleaning lady accidently touched his keyboard and the computer came out of suspend, with a private conversation open with a common aquaintance that she was definitely not supposed to see. She felt very uncomfortable about that, decided to poweroff the machine by using the red button on the powerstrip.
Please compare autologin to a bank card that makes an ATM spit out money without other authentication than inserting the bank card.
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“None” should also be an option, based on a sample size of me.
I used to use GDM just because I already had it after installing gnome originally, but after switching to niri+noctalia, I just decided that starting from shell is good enough. Configured my zshrc to detect if a graphical session already exists and if not, it starts niri automatically. Just a simple if-statement I grabbed off the internet and modified slightly to log me out again once niri exits, otherwise you’d be able to hotkey stop niri even from the noctalia lock screen and have shell access lol
The success measurement of openSUSE is that you ‘never have to reboot and’ never see DM/login
If you’re “never rebooting” you’re doing it wrong.
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Linux distros promote themselves to potential new users on their stability, security, and reliability. Reliability to me means not having to perpetually reboot. A measure of merit for openSUSE would be few reboots and, thus, few views of DM/login screens.
That really depends on what you see from zypper output and zypper ps -s
My Leap 16.0 ADS-B system rarely gets rebooted, all it does is push data. Likewise for my RPi3 GPS time server unless it’s chrony in the que. Both get rebooted for kernel updates, but most of the time it’s just a few services to restart, they are all minimal installs so not much installed…
Stability != Never reboot.
It never has. To the best of my knowledge, Leap isn’t doing kernel live patching, for instance, and even if it was, that still doesn’t mean you never reboot.
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I would switch to wayland but KDE Plasma Login Manager still doesn’t have headless multisession multiuser support it is still basically remote control and I have headless terminal servers so that is a requirement for us. I hope they get their act together soon because last I checked there wasn’t even something with the headless RDP support to test.
So for now I am still using X11 and xrdp which works flawlessly.
Plasma-login-manager doesn’t even exist in Tumbleweed or Leap yet, unless you’ve installed it manually from the Devel repository.
Agree 100% but TW now has plasma 6.7 and KDE has said they plan to remove X11 support from plasma 6.8 which is is scheduled for release in about 3 months so you would kind of expect that the headless multisession RDP support would be at least available to test by now. It was not even available in my Neon test system last time I checked. This leaves those of us that have terminal servers in a real predicament if plasma 6.8 is forced out with plasma-login-manager and that support. Hopefully if they KDE folks force that situation TW will still include X11 support otherwise enterprise terminal servers will be forced to either stop updating or switch to gnome, neither of which is a reasonable option.
Which is Wayland only, FYI. Please, don’t shoot the messenger, Joe 
. I would not know a ready to go alternative / replacement atm. I do remember that a US company I worked for ~3 years ago were in the process of decommisioning their terminal servers for exactly the X11 / Wayland issues. They saw this coming and foresaw that their infra would not pass their certification requirements. Don’t know what alternative they went for, I was in there for different stuff. Yesterday I spoke to their former CTO ( he and the entire IT dept. were let go briefly after I finished my gig there ), but he had no idea how or what they do now, since all IT work was outsourced when new owner + management took over, though he did say that he wouldn’t be surprised if they went for paying a load of money for something like Teamviewer Enterprise ( or whatever ).
I sure hope there will be some kind of solution in the making for your usecase(s), but I would not put my hopes on SUSE/openSUSE modifying upstream software stacks like GNOME / KDE. The *Upstream First" policy has proved to be the best and I strongly doubt they will leave that. SUSE does not even have a desktop edition anymore, so why would they care / invest? And, once you start doing such a thing, you have to keep doing it, which basically boils down to maintaining your own fork. I guess you don’t want to rely on such a situation either.
I will immediately admit that I don’t know enough details about your specific setup / usecase to come up with solid advice, other than to suggest that you develop a plan B. I know management doesn’t like that for the sake of costs, but it can be a lifesaver. Mostly companies only start doing so after the < redacted > hit the fan.
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Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Yes, GNOME is wayland only, however, GDM+GNOME provides headless multisession/multiuser support which I have tested for quite a while and which generally works flawlessly we just do not want to switch from KDE to GNOME.
The xrdp developers are also working on changes that would allow it to work with X11 or Wayland, so that too will be an option.
And the KDE developers do have headless multisession RDP on their roadmap for plasma-login-manager but based on the progress so far I am doubtful that they will deliver it before Plasma 6.8 comes out.
Terminal servers are a critical enterprise feature so I would HOPE ( and know not a great strategy ) that KDE would rethink their strategy if they cannot deliver a critical feature before removing X11.
My responses are for exactly the reasons you state to be proactive and not wait for the $hit to hit the fan 
I have been looking at options for roughly a year but the above is all I’ve come up with.
Do you have any insight as to what opensuse/TW will do if 6.8 is released without x11 and without the headless rdp ? At this point plasma-login-manager exists but last I checked it does not have that support in the beta releases and opensuse does not even have the package available to test either. I have been monitoring a Neon test machine I have to see if it appears but haven’t seen it there either.
Nobody ships a KDE based enterprise desktop. (Being able to install it via EPEL or PackageHub, is not the same thing)
So it’s not surprising that the upstream KDE project doesn’t put particularly high priority on what are largely Enterprise features.
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@malcolmlewis way never fail me, or startplasma-wayland from TTY.