Console Display Manager is another great program I found on forums. I downloaded it from GitHub, the author’s website seems to be down. Followed that wiki page to configure it, then deactivated XDM and rebooted. I logged in in console and the display manager showed up

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4140/4926241632_14cb2f7af7_b.jpg

CDM works a little different than other DMs. You log in in console (tty1), then /etc/profile.d/zzz-cdm-profile.sh kicks in and you see the display manager. It checks if you are in console, then launches cdm and you choose DE/WM to continue. Basically, you don’t need to manually run startx just press the enter key.

I use the default theme instead of cdm theme. You can try those themes (/usr/share/cdm/themes) just fire up cdm in your terminals, use escape key to quit. You don’t have to log out only to see the theme. Honesty, the color schemes are not so good in console, that’s the reason I chose default them. It’s not fancy but still looks good.

The memory usage is slightly smaller, I believe if it’s written in C, it would use less. It is written in Bash. This was with XDM:

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4141/4926241636_46101814d3_o.png

And this was with CDM:

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4102/4926241640_63f50d1705_o.png

It’s about 2-3 MB less but XDM had two more dbus programs running, so it’s probably 1-2 MB less.

The reason I used XDM was because I didn’t want to type startx, now I have removed the XDM since I still don’t need to with CDM. My Gentoo is slimmer a little bit.