One of the very first things that you see after you boot into your OS, will be your Display Manager. SDDM is a common display manager on many modern Linux distributions today. However, some Linux distributions may only provide you with as basic SDDM login theme by default - so, what if you want to change that? Well like everything on Linux - you can customize almost anything to your needs.

In this guide I'll explain how to download and install SDDM themes on Arch Linux.

Favourites

There are many cool looking SDDM themes to choose from for Linux. Here is a quick preview of a few of my favourites.

• Aerial
• Sugar Candy
• Astronaut

Installation

Most of the time, you can simply install a theme you like via your package manager. However, if you encounter any errors while doing so, here I'll explain how you can install them manually.

First you need to open a terminal and navigate to the SDDM themes folder:

1cd /usr/share/sddm/themes

Next, we switch to root and git clone the SDDM theme repository to the theme folder. For this example I'll be using the Aerial SDDM theme:

1sudo su

Next visit the GitHub page for the SDDM theme you like and copy the repository URL:

Now back in the terminal, clone the repository. Press Ctrl Shift v after the git clone command:

1git clone https://github.com/3ximus/aerial-sddm-theme.git

Press Return. If you enter the ls command, we can see that the theme is now downloaded:

Dependencies

Some themes may require additional dependencies to work. On the Arial GitHub page we can see that it requires these. So we will install them:

1pacman -S gst-libav phonon-qt5-gstreamer gst-plugins-good qt5-quickcontrols qt5-graphicaleffects qt5-multimedia

SDDM Config

In order to see the theme after a reboot, we must set the theme name in the SDDM config:

1sudo vim /usr/lib/sddm/sddm.conf.d/default.conf

Once the file is open, look for the line which declares the name of the theme to use and set the name to the folder name of the theme you downloaded:

1[Theme]
2# Current theme name
3Current=aerial-sddm-theme

Ensure that the name and case you set is identical to the folder name for your downloaded theme, save your changes, and that's it! Now after you reboot, you will see your new SDDM theme.