sddm(1)

sddm1

The simple desktop display manager

Usage

sddm [OPTIONS ...]

Overview

sddm is a display and login manager based on Qt technologies.

Using QtQuick and QML, designers are given the ability to easily create pleasant, modern looking interfaces for sddm.

sddm runs the greeter as a system user named sddm whose home directory needs to be set to /var/lib/sddm.

If pam and systemd are available, the greeter will go through logind, which will give it access to drm devices.

Distributions without pam and systemd will need to put the sddm user into the video group, otherwise errors regarding GL and drm devices might be experienced.

For X11 sessions, the cookie for X authorization is written into a temporary file /tmp/xauth_XXXXXX, owned and only accessible by the user.

Options

--test-mode

Start daemon in test mode.

--example-config

Print the complete current configuration to stdout

--help, -h

Show help message and exit.

Files

/usr/lib/sddm/sddm.conf.d

System configuration directory

/etc/sddm.conf.d

Local configuration directory

/etc/sddm.conf

Local configuration file for compatibility

/usr/share/sddm/themes

Where sddm looks for themes

Releases

6 releases since Debian 9 (Stretch); the text changed 5 times.

  1. 9
  2. 10
  3. 11
  4. 12
  5. 13
  6. Arch

--example-config since Debian 10 (Buster).

From sddm 0.21.0-7 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.