What is the default display manager
it’s lightdm
Is there acutally any difference between using different display managers?
I have changed to gdm when I installed Gnome.
From a user experience perspective GDM integrates nicely with Gnome. That whole “Gnome Experience” thing. As far as technical details I am not sure. LightDM gets me from boot to login in about 25 seconds which is pretty fast on my older laptop. When I’ve used Gnome in the past it never booted up that quickly. If you have a newer box that probably wouldn’t be as much of a concern though.
1 Like
If i remember correctly GDM is the only display manager that makes hibernation work in Gnome properly.
1 Like
GDM makes sense for something like Gnome so that’s a good solution IMHO. All the major DE’s have “their own” DM - like KDE uses SDDM. And if you’re using just a window manager startx will do just fine 
2 Likes
GDM really does boot slower than lightdm. I have noticed that as well.
There is also a bug in GDM that makes it run double instances of itself. Which is one reason Gnome used to use so much memory.
It was obvious when it popped up again in Manjaro: After 3.32, when the Gnome team had made a lot of optimizations, a fresh install of Manjaro Gnome with all the bells and whistles booted in at 750 Mb for me. Then after an update that bug came back and suddenly Gnome was back to boot in at 1.2Gb, and when looked at closely GDM was running twice.