Plasma Login Manager

The Plasma Login Manager is a display manager. It is currently in a prototype state and is – officially – not considered ready for real-world usage.

From the upstream page:

Plasma Login provides a display manager for KDE Plasma, forked from SDDM and with an new front-end providing a greeter, wallpaper plugin integration and System Settings module (KCM).

Note Plasma Login is currently in a prototype state and is not considered ready for real-world usage.

Installation

Install the plasma-login-manager-git^AUR package.

Follow Display manager#Loading the display manager to start Plasma Login at boot.

Configuration

The default configuration file for Plasma Login can be found at /usr/lib/plasma-login/defaults.conf. For any changes, create a configuration file /etc/plasmalogin.conf, or create configuration file(s) in /etc/plasmalogin.conf.d/.

Everything should work out of the box, since Arch Linux uses systemd and Plasma Login defaults to using systemd-logind for session management.

Autologin

Plasma Login supports automatic login through its configuration file, for example:

/etc/plasmalogin.conf.d/autologin.conf

[Autologin]
User=john
Session=plasma

This configuration causes a KDE Plasma session to be started for user john when the system is booted. Available session types can be found in /usr/share/xsessions/ for X and in /usr/share/wayland-sessions/ for Wayland.

To automatically log in to KDE Plasma while simultaneously locking the session (e.g. to allow autostarted apps to warm up), see KDE#Lock screen.

Passwordless login

It is possible to configure Plasma Login to allow logging into some accounts without a password. This differs from automatic login in that the user still has to choose which account to log into, and it differs from simply setting the account password to the empty string in that it only allows interactive users to log in (and not, for example, remote users logged in via SSH).

Plasma Login goes through PAM so you must configure the Plasma Login configuration of PAM:

/etc/pam.d/plasmalogin

#%PAM-1.0
auth        sufficient  pam_succeed_if.so user ingroup nopasswdlogin
auth        include     system-login
...

In order to also allow unlocking the KDE Plasma lock screen without a password, also add the same line at the top of /etc/pam.d/kde:

/etc/pam.d/kde

#%PAM-1.0
auth        sufficient  pam_succeed_if.so user ingroup nopasswdlogin
auth        include     system-login
...

You must then also be part of the nopasswdlogin group to be able to login interactively without entering your password:

# groupadd -r nopasswdlogin
# gpasswd -a username nopasswdlogin

Unlock KDE Wallet automatically on login

See KDE Wallet#Unlock KDE Wallet automatically on login.