Best Display Manager for 64 bit Pi

[lrhorer]

Opinion time. I am having some trouble with lightdm on my Raspberry Pi 4, but I am wondering if it is even worth fixing the issue? Bearing in mind my Pi4 only has 4G of RAM, what are the opinions of the best all-round Display Manager for Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm? On my large servers, I am running KDE, so from a familiarity standpoint I am leaning a bit toward installing KDE, but I don't want to badly impact performance. What do folks here think?

[kerry_s]

there is no bookworm release.

sudo raspi-config -> system -> login

[lrhorer]

There is no <System> option under the release of raspi-config running on this system, but if there is no Bookworm release, then why:



In any case, that was not really the question at hand. Do you have a recommendation for a Display Manager?

[kerry_s]

they all need to be enabled no matter which 1 you use.

the setting is in raspi-config, the boot to cli or auto login cli or boot to gui or auto login to gui

i been sick so i'm on my laptop, don't have the energy to look for you.

[lrhorer]

That does not address my question. I am asking WHICH GUI is preferred by those here in the forum. Currently lightdm is installed, but having issues. KDE, GNOME, Xfce, etc are not loaded.

[kerry_s]

xfce4 is my preferred desktop. (sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop)

when i do custom i start with raspberry lite, then comment out the raspberry repo and change the debian repos to testing.

then you have to go into raspi-config and set it to boot to gui, then in the advanced settings you need to select network manager.

the rest is standard debian.

[Gavinmc42]

I am using LXDE on Bookworm.
viewtopic.php?t=355681&start=25
You could try Mate?

Best will be something the Raspberry Pi guys tweak for Bookworm?

We will still be using Pi4/VC6 with more fluff so there probably won't be a big performance jump till Pi5?
Max tweaks will be with Mesa 23/Vulkan 1.3?
V3D is still getting commits so is still getting developed.

[redvli]

Opinion time. I am having some trouble with lightdm on my Raspberry Pi 4, but I am wondering if it is even worth fixing the issue? Bearing in mind my Pi4 only has 4G of RAM, what are the opinions of the best all-round Display Manager for Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm? On my large servers, I am running KDE, so from a familiarity standpoint I am leaning a bit toward installing KDE, but I don't want to badly impact performance. What do folks here think?

I have used lightdm with KDE Plasma on a Pi4-2GB. Earlier I used Xfce, that is why lightdm got installed. Only recently I changed it to sddm as that is the default one for KDE Plasma. Also works fine. Note that both do not have special Pi treatment like openbox and/or mutter. If you want, you can bring sddm+KDEplasma (actually the Pi) to its knees by various generic video playback actions, but just know what you want and are doing. On my Pi4-8GB sddm+KDEplasma works just as on my PCs, enough memory for heavy websites, even better then on some really nasty ad-poluted websites on a core-i3 2000 series laptop.

4GB should be enough, if you active a 4GB swap partition on UAS SSD, it should work well. I use my Pi4-2GB for test purposes, is multiboot, so it also runs native Debian Testing with KDE Plasma. As said many times, if you don't use RPiOS kernel and not some dedicated patched video related programs, you will suffer from performance issues. RealVNC can also hurt performance, disable it or remove it.

[redvli]

There is no <System> option under the release of raspi-config running on this system, but if there is no Bookworm release, then why:



In any case, that was not really the question at hand. Do you have a recommendation for a Display Manager?

Why do you post this image?
You should post the contents of sources.list* as it looks like that you have an inconsistent OS state.

Display Manager is not someting you can manage with raspi-config if you want KDE. You need generic Debian methods. Use tasksel. And quite some update-alternatives commands might be needed.

[kerry_s]

There is no <System> option under the release of raspi-config running on this system, but if there is no Bookworm release, then why:



In any case, that was not really the question at hand. Do you have a recommendation for a Display Manager?

hmm

[bjtheone]

In any case, that was not really the question at hand. Do you have a recommendation for a Display Manager?

I run with MATE. In my opinion LXDE is a bit lacking. XCFE is also pretty good. Have not played with Bookworm yet but in Bullseye Mutter is not quite ready for prime time so I reverted to openbox.

KDE works, but if you turn on all the eye candy it typically consumes a lot of resources.

[kerry_s]

when i do custom i prefer rolling, i just comment out the raspi repo on the lite version.
i usually make the changes before i even do first boot.

[radiolistener]

Where did you get working bookworm image?

On bullseye 64-lite image I tried KDE Plasma, LXDE, Xfce and GNOME:

- KDE Plasma works the best, it has no screen tearing in window mode. But graphics performance is about 30% less than LXDE and some visual effects is not so smooth. glxgears shows about 1600 fps.

- LXDE has the best graphics performance, it is even 2% better than LXDE from raspi OS desktop image. But it struggle from screen tearing even in window mode. glxgears shows about 2100 fps.

- Xfce looks very nice and works smoothly, but has bad graphics performance. glxgears shows about 1300 fps.

- GNOME works almost the same as LXDE, but with no screen tearing.

Unfortunately all configs have screen tearing in fullscreen mode. This is definitely video driver issue. KDE even works ok first 3-4 seconds at full 75 Hz frame rate and with no frame drops in fullscreen mode, but then something happens - fps drops down to about 35 fps and screen tearing appears. Xfce and LXDE also have frame drops - it can shows you 75 fps, but actually it just drops some frames and don't displaying it at all.

[bls]

Old dog here I use xdm as my Display Manager (instead of lightdm), and icewm as my Window Manager.

lightdm has more features than xdm (e.g., autologin, etc), but if you just want something to pop up an X11 username/password prompt and don't want to use autologin, xdm is pretty sweet. There are also wdm and sddm. wdm looks to me like xdm with a few more features. When I looked at sddm i thought it was pretty nice, but was not able to use it with tightvnc/tigervnc virtual desktops.

icewm is a full-featured Window Manager in terms of window management, but it doesn't have all the features of a full desktop environment like kde, loxde, or gnome. Compared to today's desktop environments it's pretty boring, but it is super-lightweight, straightforward to configure, and has themes. Plus, less features means less to configure

[lrhorer]

There is no <System> option under the release of raspi-config running on this system, but if there is no Bookworm release, then why:



In any case, that was not really the question at hand. Do you have a recommendation for a Display Manager?

Why do you post this image?

Why not? It shows the operational state of the RPi

You should post the contents of sources.list* as it looks like that you have an inconsistent OS state.

OK:

Code: Select all

deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ bookworm main contrib non-free rpi
# Uncomment line below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source'
#deb-src http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ buster main contrib non-free rpi

Satisfied?

Display Manager is not someting you can manage with raspi-config

I know that. Again, it's not really relevant to my question.

if you want KDE. You need generic Debian methods. Use tasksel. And quite some update-alternatives commands might be needed.

I have never done that before, and so far it seems to be working. I will take the advice if I run into trouble.

[lrhorer]

Old dog here

Me, too. <sigh>

I use xdm as my Display Manager (instead of lightdm), and icewm as my Window Manager.

I have used xdm on my servers for decades.

lightdm has more features than xdm (e.g., autologin, etc), but if you just want something to pop up an X11 username/password prompt and don't want to use autologin, xdm is pretty sweet. There are also wdm and sddm. wdm looks to me like xdm with a few more features. When I looked at sddm i thought it was pretty nice, but was not able to use it with tightvnc/tigervnc virtual desktops.

I will keep that in mind.

icewm is a full-featured Window Manager in terms of window management, but it doesn't have all the features of a full desktop environment like kde, loxde, or gnome. Compared to today's desktop environments it's pretty boring, but it is super-lightweight, straightforward to configure, and has themes. Plus, less features means less to configure

How does it compare in terms of performance?

[bls]

Old dog here

Me, too. <sigh>

Hello kindred spirit

How does it compare in terms of performance?

I've never done any performance tests, but I've been using it for as long as I've been using xdm (forever), and I've never felt that the performance was unsatisfactory.

[redvli]

Code: Select all

deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ bookworm main contrib non-free rpi
# Uncomment line below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source'
#deb-src http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ buster main contrib non-free rpi

Bookworm packages for Raspbian don't exist currently and you seem to use Buster stuff, look at your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
No surprise you have problems I would say.

[rpdom]

Bookworm packages for Raspbian don't exist currently and you seem to use Buster stuff, look at your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
No surprise you have problems I would say.

Bookworm packages for Raspbian do exist. It's the Raspberry Pi OS specific packages that aren't available yet. Those will go in the raspi.list file eventually.

However, I agree that having the Buster release for the Raspberry Pi repo is mixing things up something rotten and will cause problems.

[redvli]

Bookworm packages for Raspbian don't exist currently and you seem to use Buster stuff, look at your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
No surprise you have problems I would say.

Bookworm packages for Raspbian do exist. It's the Raspberry Pi OS specific packages that aren't available yet.

That is why I wrote "Bookworm packages for Raspbian" and not "Debian Bookworm aarch64 packages".

Anyhow OP seems to be victim of the excellent RPL pre-release management. I only wonder now how OP is going to fix it. Sure people will advise to 'burn a fresh image'. See also viewtopic.php?p=2136115

[lrhorer]

Oops! I forgot about sources.list.d/ That is my goof. I'm upgrading now. I am not terribly opposed to rebuilding this system from scratch, since it does not have much in the way of customization. The only "gotcha" of which I can think is the system is booting from an internal SSD at /dev/sda rather than from micro SD media. It's been quite a while since I built this system, and I don't recall the steps for loading the OS, assuming they have not changed for the new 64 bit version of the OS. I will have to dig into that at some point.

[lrhorer]

Code: Select all

deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ bookworm main contrib non-free rpi
# Uncomment line below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source'
#deb-src http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ buster main contrib non-free rpi

Bookworm packages for Raspbian don't exist currently and you seem to use Buster stuff, look at your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
No surprise you have problems I would say.

As I mentioned above, I forgot about sources.list.d/, but everything seems to be working now.

[toqeer]

I recently tested a few Python libraries that allow you to create a GUI. PyQT and Tkinter are the most popular Python libraries to create interfaces on Raspberry Pi.

[redvli]

As I mentioned above, I forgot about sources.list.d/, but everything seems to be working now.

Yes it should work, but the topic is still unclear about what you installed as version for a display manager. I guess Buster rpt*/rpi* stuff.
What is the output of:
sudo apt list openbox lightdm mutter

[rpdom]

Bookworm packages for Raspbian don't exist currently and you seem to use Buster stuff, look at your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
No surprise you have problems I would say.

Bookworm packages for Raspbian do exist. It's the Raspberry Pi OS specific packages that aren't available yet.

That is why I wrote "Bookworm packages for Raspbian" and not "Debian Bookworm aarch64 packages".

I don't see what Debian has to do with it. Your statement is still incorrect.