I don't remember with sddm, I had to dump it as well as kde because sddm is messed up too, or was when I tried kde 5.x. The dumping of kdm, which was always a really good solid dm, in favor of a dm that kde doesn't even make, and which kind of sucks, to me was another big red flag.

On these there's usually somewhere on the screen to click that activates a drop menu for selecting desktop to start, usually there's also another thing to click that gives you options, like restart, shutdown, etc.

I dumped sddm as soon as I gave up on kde because sddm isn't any good either, and went with lightdm, so I can't help you locate the sddm session picker, I know it's there somewhere but I don't know where on the screen it is.

Or you can when you get to the login simply exit X, ctrl alt f1, then do: service sddm stop; service lightdm start

and that should bring up lightdm.

By the way, I didn't take the decision to drop kde lightly, I had to be fully convinced that the project was totally hopeless, which one of their core devs helped me with, when I posted some of these issue reports, with a lot of details, he babbled a bunch of nonsense, and denied there were bugs, at which point, and I tried that several times, I realized that the actual problem with kde, like with gnome, IS THE PROJECT ITSELF, so there's nothing that is going to fix it. Both gnome and kde now seem set on being bad desktops that meet a mystery set of users's needs, certainly not real computer users at this point. Since sddm is poorly maintained, or was, picking it simply showed me that kde had lost sight of what matters in a desktop, and were stuck on things that do not matter to real users anymore.

So there's a limit to what I can help with kde issues, I am fully convinced, by kde itself, that it is no longer a serious desktop, and it's certainly not a desktop I can trust or rely on for production work, nor is it a desktop I can support, or recommend, which is very sad, because kde was great at 3.5, clearly superior to all the alternatives as far as I could tell. fast, configurable, flexible, it was basically perfect. Until the dreaded plasma rewrite happened, then it all went to cr#p.
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default-display manager is a file in /etc/x11.
I could not get to it from terminal, mysterously wehn I typed cd /etc/x11 it repoeted no dile or directory., but cd /etc/shows it in there, and ls -al reports that it is a directory. I had to go in there from the gui and selct open terminal here to be able to edit it as root.
This laptop I am attempting to install is old and weak in computing power, because kde works fine in other more modern computers, and I am used to it.
I am not used to xfce, I ddin't see a button to restart computer, although I could log into terminal and issue command, of course. Iam not seeing any selector to log into xfce, so I guess that I will have to re-install the whole OS and install xfce via smxi, OK? I got xfce because after I modified default-display manager to boot into xfce it did not do anything just got me a command prompt where I typed startx as user.
Since this computer is for my wife who is totally ignorant about computers, and she had a laptop which worked OK with kde, until her physical display started failing, she will not use this computer, I guess I will just have to replace display in working laptop.
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the pain kde has caused its loyal users is unforgiveable, and that's why I don't use it anymore, they simply seem to have stopped realizing that they actually had users. I use 'had' in past tense, for obvious reasons.

I was very pissed off when they did this, because it cost me literally 1 week of lost time.

And yes, you have to learn some things to use xfce, but unlike kde, xfce actually works, and is consistent and reliable. In fact, my current debian xfce reminds me of nothing less than my old kde 3.5, it's not perfect, but at least it's fast, reliable, light, and works.

The disrespect to their existing userbase is a problem both gnome and kde manifest consistently now, it's like they keep changing stuff for some mystical users, who as far as I can tell simply do not exist, and screw over their real users, who then go off and form mate/cinnamon, in the case of gnome, or trinity, in the case of kde, though I don't believe trinity has gained as much traction as mate/cinnamon have. Now there's budgie too, though I'm not sure of its relation to gnome.

You don't have to reinstall, all you have to do is:

apt-get remove --purge sddm lightdm


then apt-get install lightdm, and presto, there you are.
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What do you think about enlightenment?
Users swear by it.
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Never tried enlightenment, back when I was testing all the desktops I could, it was always in a perpetual beta pre release state, so I never tested it.

I like xfce because it basically lets me set up something very similar to my old kde 3.5 desktop, then it stays the way I made it. I like fluxbox/openbox for systems that I won't need much complex gui interaction with. That's about all I check or use now that I gave up on kde. gnome I never felt was a very good desktop, and after gnome3, I felt like the developers had simply disconnected from our reality.
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