Add some life to your KDE launcher with the Ittu theme

The login screen is where we quickly select a username and enter our password to access the desktop. There are multiple login managers in GNU/Linux, with SDDM ( Simple Desktop Display Manager ) being the one used by the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

These desktop environments can, in turn, have various "themes" with specific artwork. The official KDE theme is Breeze , but today we're going to try a new one called Ittu , which, in addition to having a slightly different layout by placing the buttons on the sides, introduces the possibility of having animated avatars for our users.

Its installation is very simple: go to system preferences or the application launcher and search for SDDM (Login Screen), then press the " Get New Login Screens " button, install the "Ittu" theme, select it and do the typical apply/accept.

By default, there are about 20 GIFs to use as avatars. If you prefer to use your own animations (200 x 200 pixels), you can copy them to the appropriate directory after downloading them. It would look something like this:

sudo cp 21.gif otro.gif /usr/share/sddm/themes/ittu/components/artwork/gifs

And then we choose the one we prefer for our avatars:

sudo cp 21.gif tannhausser.gif

(naturally, you replace my nickname with your username).

In the configuration file /usr/share/sddm/themes/ittu/theme.conf there is the possibility of introducing some customizations , relating to the background image , effects, transparencies , as well as the size or shape (square, circular) of the avatar.

Capturing an image of our login screen

You might want to share an image of your avatars, or of the login screen in question. Forget complicated scripts…most session managers offer a preview of themes, which we can invoke from the command line:

In the case of the Ittu Theme, it would be:

sddm-greeter --test-mode --theme /usr/share/sddm/themes/ittu

The same applies to Breeze or any other system we use with SDDM:

sddm-greeter --test-mode --theme /usr/share/sddm/themes/breeze

And take a screenshot of the pop-up window with our usual tool (Spectacle for example).

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