Hi,
I have Rocky Linux 8.x and 9.x running on all my desktop clients, with KDE from EPEL as desktop environment.
Since SDDM is buggy and doesn’t play well with NVidia drivers, I replaced it with GDM, which works quite nicely.
Here’s the configuration I’m using on Rocky Linux 9:
- name: Install GNOME Display Manager
ansible.builtin.dnf:
name: gdm
state: present
install_weak_deps: false
- name: Default to Plasma X11 session
ansible.builtin.copy:
src: "{{item}}"
dest: /etc/accountsservice/user-templates/
owner: root
group: root
mode: 0644
with_items:
- administrator
- standard
- name: Custom logo for GDM
ansible.builtin.copy:
src: microlinux-logo.png
dest: /usr/share/pixmaps/fedora-gdm-logo.png
owner: root
group: root
mode: 0644
- name: Hide Wayland sessions in GDM menu
ansible.builtin.lineinfile:
path: "/usr/share/wayland-sessions/{{item}}.desktop"
line: NoDisplay=true
with_items:
- gnome
- gnome-wayland
- plasma
And here’s the corresponding /etc/accountsservice/user-templates/standard file:
[Template]
EnvironmentFiles=/etc/os-release;
[com.redhat.AccountsServiceUser.System]
id='${ID}'
version-id='${VERSION_ID}'
[User]
Session=plasmax11
Icon=${HOME}/.face
This configuration makes sure GDM fires up KDE as the default environment.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work on Rocky Linux 8.x. Every user still has to choose PlasmaX11 explicitly. If he or she doesn’t do that, than a minimal GNOME environment gets started. There seems to be no way to prevent GNOME from starting up.
I don’t know exactly how this works under the hood, but if there’s one single binary (something like /usr/bin/startgnome) that fires up GNOME, I could wipe that and replace it with a symlink to something like /usr/bin/startkde. That one exists, but I don’t know if such a thing would work.
Any suggestions ?