Currently in the Natty Blueprints there is a blueprint to drop GDM (Gnome Display Manager) for LightDM a new multi-platform Display Manager.

The advantages of using LightDM instead GDM are according to launchpad blueprint:

– Faster – the greeter doesn’t require an entire GNOME session to run

– More flexible – multiple greeters are supported through a well defined interface. This allows Ubuntu derivatives to use the same display manager (e.g. Kubuntu, Lubuntu etc).

– Simpler codebase – similar feature set in ~5,000 lines of code compared to 50,000 in GDM

– Supports more usecases – first class support for XDMCP and multihead.

Note: this blueprint is marked with a “low priority” tag on launchpad so it may not end up landing in 11.04.

In related news a new default user avatar has landed in Natty.

LightDM Homepage: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/LightDM