Linux Mint 18.2 may ship with LightDM and Unity Greeter by default, replacing the current MDM login screen.

Developers behind the popular Ubuntu-derivative say they’ve ‘been testing [LightDM] as an alternative to Mint Display Manager [MDM] and adding support where it was missing and the results are promising.’

A distro-agnostic display manager, LightDM has been used in Ubuntu since 2011, using Unity Greeter as its login screen front-end.

As with the incumbent MDM, Mint developers are keep to expose greeter configuration and settings to users. To this end they’ve created a new app called lightdm-settings:

Looks nifty.

The switch will enable guest sessions on Linux Mint, something MDM doesn’t (at present) offer. Guest sessions create a temporary user account with full access to apps and networking but whose data is deleted when logging out.

While Mint conclude that LightDM “isn’t as full-featured, as configurable or themeable as MDM” they reason that like PulseAudio or Systemd it has become a standard component across most Linux distributions.