Display Managers

Ly

Athena OS ships Ly as a lightweight, terminal-based display manager, designed for users who value simplicity, speed, and minimal resource usage.

Ly runs entirely in a text user interface (TUI) and is especially well suited for tiling window managers and low-overhead setups. It is ultra-lightweight and fast, provides a fully keyboard-driven login experience, has no dependency on a graphical stack, and is ideal for minimal and advanced workflows alike.

Ly is configured through a single configuration file /etc/ly/config.ini.

SDDM

Athena OS provides SDDM as Display Manager because of its reliability and flexibility, in particular the sddm-astronaut-theme.

It offers several themes, static and dynamic, that can be set by editing:

Athena Arch

/usr/share/sddm/themes/sddm-astronaut-theme/metadata.desktop:

[SddmGreeterTheme]
Name=sddm-astronaut-theme
Description=sddm-astronaut-theme
Author=keyitdev
Website=https://github.com/Keyitdev/sddm-astronaut-theme
License=GPL-3.0-or-later
Type=sddm-theme
Version=1.3
ConfigFile=Themes/astronaut.conf
Screenshot=Previews/astronaut.png
MainScript=Main.qml
TranslationsDirectory=translations
Theme-Id=sddm-astronaut-theme
Theme-API=2.0
QtVersion=6

To set a different theme, edit ConfigFile=Themes/astronaut.conf line by declaring your favourite .conf file. The name of the available config files can be found in /usr/share/sddm/themes/sddm-astronaut-theme/Themes directory.

Athena Nix

/etc/nixos/modules/dms/sddm/default.nix :

    environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
      (sddm-astronaut.override {
        embeddedTheme = "cyberpunk";
      })
    ];

To set a different theme, edit embeddedTheme = "cyberpunk"; line by replacing its value by your favourite theme. The name of the available themes can be found between the filename, without extension, of files in the /run/current-system/sw/share/sddm/themes/sddm-astronaut-theme/Themes directory.

Astronaut

Themes/astronaut.conf

Black Hole

Themes/black_hole.conf

Cyberpunk

Themes/cyberpunk.conf

Cyborg

Themes/japanese_aesthetic.conf

Kath

Themes/hyprland_kath.conf

Jake The Dog

Themes/jake_the_dog.conf

Pixel Sakura

Themes/pixel_sakura.conf

Post-Apocalypse

Themes/post-apocalyptic_hacker.conf

Purple Leaves

Themes/purple_leaves.conf

Multiple monitors

On some systems, the display manager may appear on an unexpected monitor. In framebuffer-based setups, this can be influenced via kernel parameters.

To force the Linux framebuffer console (and framebuffer-based display managers) to appear on a specific framebuffer device, edit /etc/kernel/cmdline and add:

fbcon=map:N

where N is the framebuffer index. Finally, run:

sudo rebuild-ukis

Available framebuffer devices can be listed with:

ls /dev/fb*

This method affects the kernel framebuffer console, not display managers using modern KMS/DRM paths.

Framebuffer indices do not necessarily match physical monitor order. On modern systems (especially Wayland or multi-GPU setups), this option may have no effect.

If this does not work, monitor selection must be handled via GPU driver configuration or display manager–specific settings.