Ly Alternatives

Ly is described as 'TUI (ncurses-like) display manager' and is an app in the system & hardware category. There are more than 10 alternatives to Ly for Linux, BSD and Xfce. The best Ly alternative is LightDM, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Ly are SDDM, emptty, SLiM and GDM.

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Get a badge for your siteLy alternatives page was last updated Jul 29, 2026

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L
LightDM
8 likes
A lightweight display manager.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Platforms
Linux
L
Good alternative?Is LightDM a good alternative to Ly?
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S
SDDM
6 likes
Simple Desktop Display Manager is a display manager (a graphical login program and session manager) for the X11 and Wayland windowing systems.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Platforms
Linux
S
Good alternative?Is SDDM a good alternative to Ly?
emptty
2 likes
Dead simple CLI Display Manager on TTY.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (MIT)
Platforms
Linux
Good alternative?Is emptty a good alternative to Ly?
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S
SLiM
3 likes
Lightweight and elegant graphical login solution.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Alerts
Discontinued
Platforms
Linux
Xfce
S
Good alternative?Is SLiM a good alternative to Ly?
GDM
3 likes
GNOME Display Manager is a display manager (a graphical login manager) for the windowing systems X11 and Wayland.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Linux
Good alternative?Is GDM a good alternative to Ly?
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U
Universal Wayland Session Manager
1 like
Wraps standalone Wayland compositors into a set of Systemd units on the fly. This provides robust session management including environment, XDG autostart support, bi-directional binding with login session, and clean shutdown.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (MIT)
Platforms
Linux
U
Good alternative?Is this a good alternative to Ly?
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T
tbsm
1 like
Terminal Based Session Manager is an application or session launcher, written in pure bash with no ncurses or dialog dependencies. It is inspired by cdm, tdm, in some way by krunner and related.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Linux
T
Good alternative?Is tbsm a good alternative to Ly?
M
M
MDM (login manager)
1 like
The MDM Display Manager.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Origin
Ireland
EU
Platforms
Linux
M
Good alternative?Is MDM (login manager) a good alternative to Ly?
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M
mlogind
1 like
The MidnightBSD login manager (forked from SLiM).
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Origin
United States
Platforms
BSD
M
Good alternative?Is mlogind a good alternative to Ly?
B
B
Brzdm
1 like
Brzdm is a simple graphical login manager for X11. It aims to be simple, fast and independent from the various desktop environments. Text and image display is handled by imlib2.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Platforms
Linux
B
Good alternative?Is Brzdm a good alternative to Ly?
lemurs
1 like
Terminal User Interface (TUI) Display/Login Manager written in Rust that works on most GNU/Linux and BSD distributions. It can work both with or without SystemD.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (Apache-2.0)
Platforms
Linux
Good alternative?Is lemurs a good alternative to Ly?
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T
TDM
Like
Console TDM is an extension for xorg-xinit written in pure bash. It is inspired by CDM, which aimed to be a replacement of display managers such as GDM.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Platforms
Linux
T
Good alternative?Is TDM a good alternative to Ly?