Lock and login

The lock, and the login screen: one screen at two moments.

The lock screen

SUPER L locks the session, and the shell draws the lock itself through the compositor’s session lock, so a shell that crashes leaves the machine held rather than open.

• The desk stays behind it, blurred enough that text on it cannot be read.
• The time and the date are in the middle, and the battery ring in the top right corner.
• Your picture and name are over the field.
• “Type your password to unlock” stands where the field is; the field appears when you start typing.
• Restart and shut down are in the bottom-left corner, each armed by the first click and run by the second.

The password goes through PAM’s login configuration, so hyprlock is not needed. A wrong one shakes the field and says why under it; Escape clears the field.

Settings → Session → Lock screen holds the Blur, 8 to 64 px, previewed over the wallpaper, and You: a name and a picture for the lock screen — click the picture, or drop an image on the card. Left empty, both come from your account, as on the login screen.

When you leave it alone

The shell is its own idle daemon. Settings → Session → When you leave has three waits:

Slider	What happens
Lock after	The session locks
Screen off after	The screen switches off
Suspend after	The session locks, then the machine suspends

Each is in minutes, from 0 to 60, and 0 reads Never. All three are off until you set them. A video player, or a browser playing full screen, asks the compositor not to count as idle, and nothing happens while it plays. Suspend always locks first, and is skipped if the lock does not come up.

The screen comes back with the next key or movement, and SUPER SHIFT D switches it off and on by hand.

Tip

Set the screen to go off after the lock, not before. The lock takes its picture of the desk as it goes up, and a screen that is already dark gives it a plain ground instead. The slider says “before the lock” when it is set that way.

The login screen

The login screen is the lock with the desk taken away: an SDDM theme with the same clock in the same place, the same face and the same field, over a painting of brush strokes. It does not follow the palette, because it comes before there is a user to have chosen one.

• The face is the account picker. With more than one account, pressing the picture turns it into the list.
• The session is chosen in the bottom-right corner.
• Restart and shut down are in the bottom-left corner, armed by the first click and run by the second. There is no suspend.
• The battery ring sits in the top right, read straight from the battery.
• The line under the field says when Caps Lock is on.

The account and session lists take the pointer only; the keyboard stays in the field.

How it starts

./setup install switches it on, unless --skip-system: it copies the theme into /usr/share/sddm/themes/impasto/, names it in /etc/sddm.conf.d/10-impasto.conf, and enables sddm where no display manager is enabled yet. The login screen comes up at the next boot.

A machine that already starts another display manager keeps it. To change, disable that one, then run sudo systemctl enable sddm.

SDDM reads the files in /etc/sddm.conf.d/ in name order and /etc/sddm.conf last, each over the one before, so a theme named in a file that sorts after 10-impasto.conf wins. Leave 10-impasto.conf as it is: setup owns it.

To try the theme without logging out, run its test mode from the repository’s root. It reads the repository directly, so a change can be tried before it is installed:

sddm-greeter-qt6 --test-mode --theme system/usr/share/sddm/themes/impasto

Note

The power buttons are not drawn in test mode, because SDDM reports them unavailable there. A theme that fails to load says why in red on SDDM’s own fallback screen, not in the terminal.

Your picture

The face on both screens is /var/lib/impasto/faces/<username>.face.icon, yours to put there; without one, both show your initials. setup makes the folder and never removes it. It is kept outside your home because SDDM reads as its own user and cannot see into it.

sudo install -m 644 ~/picture.png /var/lib/impasto/faces/$USER.face.icon

The lock screen looks there first, then at ~/.face, ~/.face.icon and AccountsService. The name under the picture is your account’s full name, which chfn sets, or the login name when there is none. The lock screen can take another name and picture from Settings → Session; the login screen always reads the system’s.

What the two screens do not do is listed under Limitations.