image

Update: A new graphical application Login Manager Settings has been released since I wrote this article. It makes it much easier to customize the login screen. I recommend using the app instead of following this guide.

Theme And Background

There are some apps that let you change the appearance (theme and background) of Gnome’s Login Manager (GDM), or its settings. The ones I know of are complicated to use. For example, Loginized is a GUI (Graphical) program that lets you chose a theme and a background for GDM. But, in order for a theme to appear in its list, you have to do some extra steps on terminal.

Because of that reason, I have created a terminal app (gdm-tools) that manages everything with one-line commands. To install this app, go to https://github.com/realmazharhussain/gdm-tools.git. Follow the install instructions provided there.

Once the app is installed, open terminal and type following commands for their respective actions:

  • Get a List of Available Themes: set-gdm-theme list
    or
    set-gdm-theme -l
  • Set Theme: set-gdm-theme set
    or
    set-gdm-theme -s
  • Change Background Image: set-gdm-theme set --background [/path/to/image]
    or
    set-gdm-theme set -b [/path/to/image]
  • Remove Background Image: set-gdm-theme set --background none
    or
    set-gdm-theme -s -b none
  • Change Theme and Background at Once: set-gdm-theme set [themeName] [/path/to/image]
  • Reset Everything Back to Defaults: set-gdm-theme reset
  • Short Help: set-gdm-theme --help
    or
    set-gdm-theme -h
  • Detailed Help man set-gdm-theme

If you are using fish shell, this program has auto-completions for you. Type half of the command, then press tab and it will give you suggestions or complete the command for you. For example, typing ‘set-gdm-theme -s def‘ and then pressing tab will complete to ‘set-gdm-theme -s default‘ in most cases.

Configuration and Settings

Once gdm-tools is installed, you can type ‘gnomeconf2gdm‘ in terminal to Apply your current Gnome Settings to GDM. It applies following settings to GDM:

  1. Appearance 1. cursor-theme
    2. icon-theme
    3. show-battery-percentage (yes/no)
    4. clock-show-weekday (yes/no)
    5. clock-format (12h/24h)
  2. Touchpad 1. tap-to-click (enabled/disabled)
    2. pointer speed
  3. Night Light (all night light settings)

You can email me at realmazharhussain@gmail.com if you want additional settings to be included in the list. Or you can open an issue on gdm-tools github repo.

You can also learn how to change GDM settings by editing config files directly if you read this section of ArchWiki page on GDM.