Ly – A lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD

(codeberg.org)

106 points by modinfo 6 days ago|15 comments

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Zambyte 6 days ago

About a year and a half ago now the developers decided to completely rewrite Ly, porting it from C to Zig

https://codeberg.org/fairyglade/ly/commit/d8d2d5a8bfa8907451...

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klaussilveira 6 days ago

I'm using this just because of the Doom animation. It's just too (zero)cool to start the day as if it was a scene from the Hackers movie.

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diath 6 days ago

Anyone else just not use any DM? The user/password prompt is sufficient for me and then my shell calls startx when initialized from the tty. It was mostly due to laziness that I did not feel like experimenting with any when I first migrated to Linux but then I just never felt the need to install one. My PC boots, asks me for user/password, then boots the X session and Cinnamon DE.

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hecanjog 6 days ago

Never bothered to set one up either! I type `startx` and get dumped into dwm. (Udiskie is a nice addition for automounting drives too.)

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ratrocket 6 days ago

I also type "startx". Never saw the point of a display manager (which might be my own shortcoming!).

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dmwilcox 6 days ago

Yup, but I still have graphics start on a tty ;) I just don't have a login because I use an ephemeral OS (custom alpine base) with runit. It's like windows 95 all over again, you start the computer and that's it, use it. Highly recommended, no passwords just yubikeys

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a96 6 days ago

Switch console, ^z and you got a login shell. Handy for anyone who happends to find your device.

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DyslexicAtheist 6 days ago

yepp, running sway as non-root

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Oxodao 6 days ago

It's great to see this pop up once in a while on HN. Nice to see that it's been rewritten in Zig !

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skerit 6 days ago

I switched to Ly a few weeks ago, after SDDM kept crashing. And I switched to SDDM because GDM did the same thing earlier. They both were caught in some kind of crash-loop that it was impossible for me to switch to another virtual console.

Now I have 0 issues.

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zetalyrae 6 days ago

I use this on NixOS[0] with the Matrix digital rain animation and enjoy it way too much :)

[0] https://github.com/eudoxia0/dotfiles/blob/a812dd5b5e62e53b30...

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gunalx 6 days ago

How did you get this to work? (See the config and did this before but never got ly to work on nixos, i migth have just been to early i guess)

Ive been using LY on arch for a while, and it is great looking, when it works, but it has lots of issues. Mostly related to multi monitor, kernel warnings filling up the screen, and for all being just sligthly broken. But then again probably user error.

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zetalyrae 5 days ago

NixOS 25.05 had a very old version of Ly that doesn't support the latest config. I switched to NixOS unstable and that worked.

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evanjrowley 3 days ago

The out-of-the-box Linux installation on the MNT Pocket Reform came with this display manager. I love it.

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coolcoder613 6 days ago

I use lemurs, seems pretty similar.