KDE’s upcoming Plasma Login Manager will make its first official appearance in Plasma 6.6 (scheduled for release on February 17), explicitly designed as a successor to the long-standing SDDM, which has been used by KDE Plasma for years.

KDE developers have framed it as deeply integrated into the Plasma stack itself, with the goal of modernizing the login process by aligning it more closely with how Plasma sessions are actually started and managed, reducing historical complexity and duplicated logic that accumulated around SDDM.

However, it does come with a few limitations, ones that users of systemd-free Linux distributions or BSD systems likely won’t appreciate. Here’s what it’s all about.