Mix and match login managers and desktop environments

So, I was wondering if it would be possible to use just the GDM login prompt, but have it feed into KDE desktop and if so what I’d need to tinker with to configure it.

I imagine that it’d depend on the login manager.

I use emptty, which allows me to log in on a text console.

For that login manager, I:

Add a ~/.config/emptty-custom-sessions/sway-wrapped.desktop file:

Name=Wrapped Sway Exec=/home/tal/bin/my-wrapped-sway.sh Environment=wayland

And add ~/bin/my-wrapped-sway.sh:

#!/bin/bash . ~/.bash_profile export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland exec dbus-run-session sway "$@"

I mark my-wrapped-sway.sh executable (chmod +x ~/bin/my-wrapped-sway.sh), and done.

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Adding a New Custom Desktop Environment in Arch Linux

Your desktop environment is typically started right after your login to the system using your display manager (or login manager). In graphical display managers like gdm you can select one of several session types from a list. This is where we want to add a new entry for our labwc based desktop environment.

On Arch linux these sessions are stored in /usr/share/xsessions in separate .desktop files. A /usr/share/xsessions/labwc.desktop file could look like this:

[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=labwc Comment=labwc Exec=labwc Type=Application

I’d probably give that a try.