Longtime Fedora Silverblue user here, who recently jumped over to Kinoite (Atomic KDE). I typically enable autologin on my display managers because I use whole disk encryption and already need to enter my passphrase to decrypt and start the OS.

I discovered pretty quickly that SDDM’s autologin feature currently fails under a Wayland-only setup. LightDM also failed to start under Wayland on Fedora 40, regardless of which greeter I tried.

Long story short, I opted to use GDM since I knew its automatic login feature worked fine under Wayland. It’s worth noting that KDE has it’s own lockscreen mechanism, so you won’t even see GDM unless you manually logout of your session. To try this yourself:

  1. Install GDM: rpm-ostree install --apply-live gdm

  2. Disable SDDM: sudo systemctl disable sddm

  3. Enable GDM: sudo systemctl enable gdm

  4. Reboot and select the Plasma session before logging in; this is required only once in order to establish to the default, otherwise GDM will load a broken GNOME session when autologin is enabled

  5. Edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf and add the following under [daemon] (replacing username with your own):

     AutomaticLoginEnable = true
 AutomaticLogin = username

Voila! You will no longer need to enter your user credentials before loading the desktop.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    0·
    6 months ago

    I must be lucky, works just fine for me with SDDM configured for Wayland only, autologin to a Wayland session.

    max-p@media ~ % cat /etc/sddm.conf
[Autologin]
User=max-p
Session=plasma
#Session=plasma-bigscreen
Relogin=true

[General]
DisplayServer=wayland
    • thayer@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Mind sharing what your distro and version are? The problem seems to be present on Fedora and OpenSUSE mostly, from what I can see of the issues posted online.

      As far as I can tell, sddm.conf is the legacy conf location and the more recent SDDM/KDE versions are now placing the settings in /etc/sddm.conf.d/kde_settings.conf…not that that itself should matter much here.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
        0·
        6 months ago

        Arch. That leads me to believe it’s possibly a configuration issue. Mine is pretty barebones, it’s literally just that one file.

        AFAIK the ones in sddm.conf.d are for useful because the GUI can focus on just one file without nuking other user’s configurations. But they all get loaded so it shouldn’t matter.

        The linked bug report seems to blame PAM modules, kwallet in particular which I don’t think I’ve got configured for unlock at login since there’s no password to that account in the first place.

  • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    If you want to interact as little as possible with the display manager, try using lightdm, it will also autologin and it’s lighter than gdm.

    • thayer@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      That was my first choice alternative, but I had no success with any of the available LightDM greeters under Fedora 40 Kinoite (autologin, slick or gtk). They all resulted in a “Failed to start seat: seat0” error, even after ensuring logind-check-graphical=true was set. I may give it another go when I have the time.