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Simple Desktop Display Manager

Display manager for X11 and Wayland

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated July 4, 2026
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) is a display manager (a graphical login program) for the X11 and Wayland windowing systems. SDDM was written from scratch in C++11 and supports theming via QML.

SDDM is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

01Adoption

In 2013, Fedora KDE members decided to default to SDDM in Fedora 21.

KDE chose SDDM to be the successor of the KDE Display Manager for KDE Plasma 5. In 2023, KDE forked SDDM to form the basis of the new Plasma Login Manager, which became KDE's default login manager starting with Plasma 6.6.

The LXQt developers recommend SDDM as a display manager.

Watch videos about Simple Desktop Display ManagerExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Simple Desktop Display Manager”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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