{"id":7922,"date":"2026-08-13T21:06:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T04:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=7922"},"modified":"2026-08-13T21:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T04:06:26","slug":"lightdm-is-back-from-the-dead-but-canonical-isnt-in-charge-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=7922","title":{"rendered":"LightDM is Back From The Dead, But Canonical isn’t in Charge Anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"a<\/figure>\n

There’s something satisfying about watching a Linux project everyone assumed had quietly died come back with a fresh commit. It happens more often than people expect, and it’s usually worth celebrating when it does.<\/p>\n

One of those revivals has been the return of LightDM<\/a>, the display manager Canonical built more than a decade ago.<\/p>\n

LightDM is alive<\/h2>\n
\"the<\/figure>\n

Released last week is LightDM 1.33.0<\/a>, which rolls out a bunch of improvements as well as introduces the two new maintainers who are taking over. The last release, 1.32.0<\/a>, came out way back in July 2022, marking a four-year gap in which the project barely went anywhere.<\/p>\n

You see, LightDM’s original maintainer, Robert Ancell<\/a>, had already called the project “essentially unmaintained<\/em>,” and questions about its future eventually popped up on various forums over the years.<\/p>\n

Luckily, two people willing to keep the project going stepped up, making it a community-maintained affair rather than a Canonical<\/a>-maintained one.<\/p>\n

Joshua Peisach<\/a> and Neal Gompa<\/a> are both known for their work across a string of open source projects. Joshua leads Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, and Neal doesn’t really need an introduction; he has spent years contributing to Fedora, openSUSE, and CentOS.<\/p>\n

As for what 1.33.0 actually delivers<\/strong>, the maintainers say its purpose is mainly to tag the fixes that piled up since 1.32.0 and clear out pull requests that had been sitting for years.<\/p>\n

There are no breaking changes and no dependency changes, so existing LightDM setups should upgrade without any surprises. The biggest addition worth flagging is Qt6 support for the client library<\/strong>, though that doesn’t mean Qt5 is going anywhere. Greeters built on the older toolkit will keep working just fine.<\/p>\n

There’s a long list of smaller fixes too. VNC server handling has been patched, the flood of log errors from missing PAM modules is gone, and a batch of multiseat and FreeBSD-specific bugs got cleared out.<\/p>\n

Help is needed<\/h2>\n

If you didn’t know, LightDM is a lightweight, cross-desktop display manager<\/a>. It’s the software behind your login screen, the one that authenticates you and hands things off to your desktop session once you’re in.<\/p>\n

Canonical built LightDM to replace GDM, and it debuted back in Ubuntu 11.10 as the login screen behind Unity. Ubuntu itself moved back to GDM<\/a> in 2017 when it dropped Unity for GNOME Shell, but LightDM never really went away.<\/p>\n

Linux Mint adopted it that same year and pairs it with its own slick-greeter, and elementary OS runs it through Pantheon Greeter<\/em>. Several Ubuntu flavors and Fedora spins still depend on it as well.<\/p>\n

If you think you can help LightDM evolve into something more<\/strong>, then know that Joshua and Neal are looking for new contributors to join in. You can reach them directly over Matrix<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They also point out that signing the <\/em>Canonical CLA<\/em><\/a> is no longer required.<\/em><\/p>\n

Though I have something more to add here<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

Don’t unleash your army of clankers (I believe the formal term is ‘AI agents’<\/em>) on this project; it’s already happening to many open source projects lately, and this one has just been revived. It doesn’t need to be inundated with hallucinations and pointless fixes.<\/p>\n

The maintainers also request that anyone opening a pull request for a bug fix show a way to reproduce the problem first.<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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