Their argument is that LightDM is light on code because it can't do as much as GDM and the others, and if you removed those features from the others they would be light as well.
If that's true and that is the main difference, maybe it'd be easier to strip out, or turn off, parts of GDM if Canonical wants to dispose of certain features to achieve a faster boot time.
All I know is Natty is soooooo slooooooow in booting in comparison to Meerkat that I went back to Meerkat. Well, that plus other highly annoying problems.
Definitely not, hence why I said "all I know is...", I have no idea if the gdm vs. lightdm argument that gdm is already slim but merely has a lot of features is true or not. Ubuntu 11.04 is definitely not slow due to gdm loading time alone, at the very least. Even loading Unity feels like it takes a much longer time in comparison to loading Gnome on 10.10.
HTML front-end? It has my vote. Designing themes for gdm (and kdm) is a PITA.
OH HELL YEAH!
I've been waiting on something lighter than GDM to come up. SLiM doesn't cut it. I've downloaded the tarball and will see if it plays nice with Xfce.
Default theme with LightDM running in Xephyr.
http://saturn.amphigory.org/lightdm-xephyr.png
Having trouble with dbus connection, hence running it in test mode. Will try again later.
No sssd, no fingerprint, no smartcard, no session handling, and no accessibility (linux for human beings my ass...). But cool themes!
Sorry but I really fail to see the reason behind this change, unless Canonical has decided for an all-out war against Gnome, which sounds retarded, to say the least...
After they are done adding all those features, I really do wonder just how slim it will still be...
It may have been faster to simply add on HTML themeing capabilities to gdm, and help gdm become less bloated?
Duplication of effort = bad, except when totally necessary. I guess time will tell if this new code is all that it's cracked up to be over gdm!