KDE’s upcoming Plasma Login Manager will make its first official appearance in Plasma 6.6 (scheduled for release on February 17), explicitly designed as a successor to the long-standing SDDM, which has been used by KDE Plasma for years.

KDE developers have framed it as deeply integrated into the Plasma stack itself, with the goal of modernizing the login process by aligning it more closely with how Plasma sessions are actually started and managed, reducing historical complexity and duplicated logic that accumulated around SDDM.

However, it does come with a few limitations, ones that users of systemd-free Linux distributions or BSD systems likely won’t appreciate. Here’s what it’s all about.

PLM is strictly systemd-native, relying on systemd-logind and systemd user services for session lifecycle management, permissions, and seat handling. These are hard dependencies, not optional features, and they form the foundation of the new login manager.

Because of this, systemd-free Linux distributions cannot use Plasma Login Manager, and the same applies to all BSD operating systems, which lack systemd entirely and have no compatible substitute for the APIs PLM depends on. As one of the KDE developers commented on Reddit:

“At the end of the day, we don’t ideally want to cut support for the BSDs and other niche distros, but we also don’t want to hold back on making the best experience possible for the majority user base.”

In other words, for those users, the situation remains unchanged. On their systems, Plasma will continue to rely on SDDM or other platform-specific startup mechanisms, with no indication from KDE that PLM will be made portable beyond systemd environments.