Display manager

A display manager (DM), sometimes known as login manager, X or Wayland.]]

A display manager is not mandatory. X or Wayland can be started from a shell in a VT, but one can provide extra or useful funtionality. For how to run X without a DM, see X without Display Manager.

Available software
Some display managers are listed below.

NB: Some Wayland DMs below are found in the overlay wayland-desktop, but not yet merged to the official Portage tree.

Configuration
In all major Linux operating systems, display managers are started automatically on boot. In order for this to happen automatically a script must be added to the init system's appropriate runlevel. Examples for OpenRC and systemd are provided below.

OpenRC
Under most circumstances, the OpenRC init system (Gentoo's default init system) will be used to start the display manager. The following examples will set SDDM as the display manager, adjust as necessary for other display managers.

Historically, the xdm init script handled the starting of the display manager, which has now been deprecated in favor of the display-manager init script from, jump to next section for a sytem still using xdm.

If is not present, emerge it with:

The configuration file should be modified to use SDDM:

To start the chosen display manager on boot, add the display-manager to the system's default runlevel:

To start the display-manager immediately, run:

Historical use of the deprecated xdm init script
To start the chosen display manager on boot, add the xdm to the system's default runlevel:

To start SDDM immediately, run:

systemd
If using systemd as the init system, first locate the chosen file.

To start SDDM on boot, enable the service:

To start SDDM immediately, run: