Status of MDM

[warrickguy]

I was waiting for debian/ubuntu Mate 1.4 hoping it would have mate-display-manager, but it seems MDM has completely disappeared. GDM and lightdm have a lot of dependencies. Can anyone suggest a display manager that supports user switching but doesn't drag in half of gnome?

[Gymnasiast]

It may sound strange, but: MDM! Mint has forked GDM 2.20 and renamed it to MDM, officially meaning MDM Display Manager. If you have Ubuntu, you can follow the instructions here. If you have Debian, it will get more tricky. Maybe downloading the deb file of mdm will help, but since I don't have Debian, I can't test it.

[herbman]

There are dependency problems in debian unstable:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mdm : Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15) but 2.13-35 is to be installed

[warrickguy]

Thanks for the information on the Mint version.

[mezz]

I was waiting for debian/ubuntu Mate 1.4 hoping it would have mate-display-manager, but it seems MDM has completely disappeared. GDM and lightdm have a lot of dependencies.

Not sure where you get an idea from about that LightDM has a lot of dependencies. Itself doesn't has a lot of dependencies compare to say GDM and even MDM (that is based on GDM). I know because I have worked with GDM port and created LightDM port on FreeBSD.

lightdm port dependencies: x11, xdmcp, xcb, xklavier, gettext and glib
lightdm-gtk-greeter port dependencies: gtk3 and lightdm (plus its dependencies)

I am not going to list both GDM and MDM dependencies because it's too long to list.

Can anyone suggest a display manager that supports user switching <snip>

Okay, it explains why you don't want LightDM.