[Enhancement] ReGreet gtklock equivelent

[aspauldingcode]

gtkgreet and gtklock have some visual consistency. I'd like to use ReGreet but as a way to lock the screen like swaylock/gtklock

[rharish101]

That seems like a whole different application, since ReGreet is just a GTK app that integrates with greetd. If it's actually simple, and someone would submit a PR to make it work as a locker, I'm willing to review it and merge it, but I don't have the time to go through it myself.

[aspauldingcode]

Understandable. I'll ask gtklock for change.

Otherwise, at some point I'll give it a shot with a PR hopefully.

[max-ishere]

This is definitely doable as that is how COSMIC implemented their screenlock. The same app is both a greetd frontend and a session lock.

@aspauldingcode I suppose you could peek in their codebase for tips on implementing this.

That said, I finally got things sorted out and have some free time to work on this project again. No promises yet, but I will likely finish #114 soon and finally work on preparing another PR that will move the authentication UI to a separate relm Widget. The code is kinda ready in my fork, I just need to clean it up.

With this separate widget, my guess is that we can match on some kind of config, or CLI argument, or the current user running greetd (bad idea with the current user imo) to see which type we should use for user auth widget. Then, just put that thing in as the central widget.

The most challanging thing would probably be implementing the authentication and session lock protocol. I have no idea how that works yet tbh.

[vikigenius]

I have always wondered if the better approach is to integrate the session lock protocol into the login manager daemon itself (i.e greetd) since it already has to handle authentication anyway.

So from the client side you just request to lock the screen using the IPC mechanism and then the daemon can use the same greeter for locking

[aspauldingcode]

That sounds brilliant and probably worth exploring...

[max-ishere]

I have always wondered if the better approach is to integrate the session lock protocol into the login manager daemon itself (i.e greetd) since it already has to handle authentication anyway.

So from the client side you just request to lock the screen using the IPC mechanism and then the daemon can use the same greeter for locking

I feel like it's easier to just abstract away the underlying implementation of the authentication. For example, just have a separate widget that you use instead of the central login widget.

Not sure if implementing a greetd IPC is possible for session locks.

[vikigenius]

greetd already uses pam for authentication. The greeters are basically just GUI programs that rely on IPC communication with greetd.

If greetd implements the client side protocol for the ext-session-lock-v1 then greeters can continue to be just GUI programs and don't need to interact with wayland libraries or auth libraries at all.

Rust already has libraries for wayland-protocols and wayland-client

greetd would implement those and then add an IPC command for lock and unlock. The unlock will basically be very similar to the already established IPC for auth. The lock will basically trigger communication with the server in accordance with the wayland protocol

This is the wrong place to further this discussion, but just dropping this bit of information here.

Having greetd itself function as the lockscreen as well might not be super farfetched, as it is what gdm already does. Howver it might require tighter integration with the compositor?

[R1V3RA-1508]

Idk, I use swaylock, it looks organic with any greeter