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Cover image for LightDM Web Greeter updated!
Jezer Mejía
Jezer Mejía

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LightDM Web Greeter updated!

LightDM is a light display manager for Linux, which have lots of different greeters/themes to choose. One of these greeters is the previously known as lightdm webkit2 greeter, then named lightdm web greeter, a greeter that allows theming with web technologies like HTML and JavaScript.

Sadly, this greeter was abandoned as Antergos team didn’t have time to develop their distro. The latest version, 2.2.5 uses an outdated WebKit engine, which could cause some new web technologies to not work in the greeter. Also, the Debian package is not working, a shame.

Luckily, Antergos team were developing a 3.0.0 version, getting rid of WebKit and using the QtWebEngine, based on Chromium, with Python. So, I decided to update some things about this greeter based on this pre-release.

Whither

Whither is the “new” tool that 3.0.0 would be using, developed by Antergos, allows to create web applications in a similar way to Electron.js, but in Python.

Web Greeter

So, I’m here to introduce a new pre-release. You can install it from the GitHub Repository. Though, you need to install the whither sdk to run it.

Changes

  • Command line arguments support, such as —-help, —-theme, —-debug and others
  • Some fixes with the LightDM API, as power functions didn’t work
  • Man pages updated
  • Every local request is made through web-greeter:/ url scheme
  • WebKit no longer here. Replaced with Chromium
  • Some API changes. 2.2.5 deprecated functions and globals were removed

If you are using LightDM, I recommend you to use this greeter, try some themes and create your own!

Use the Glorious theme by Manilarome~ It’s glorious.
Glorious theme gif

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