When comparing Slim vs GDM, the Slant community recommends Slim for most people. In the question“What is the best Linux Display Manager?” Slim is ranked 1st while GDM is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Slim is:
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Well organized and thorough documentation
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Pro A good starting point
Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example.
Pro REST based
REST fans will love the REST based architecture.
Pro Supports tie-ins for Rack-like middleware
Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them.
Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.
Pro Useful classes
Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.
Pro Flexible
Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it.
Pro Extremely lightweight
Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse.
Pro Open source
The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license
Pro Extremely customizable
You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency.
Pro Supports Php 5.3 and PHP 7
Pro Makes it easy to understand the way some abstract functions and classes are built
In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built.
Pro Hooks for executing code at different points in its life-cycle
Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle.
Pro It just works
GDM is dull, but it just works, and it is highly stable. It's easy to switch between environments, and it integrates really well with Fedora or other Gnome Distros.
Pro Can run Wayland sessions
GDM can start Wayland sessions, which is the default for recent GNOME versions.
Pro Always signs the GNOME keyring
Works with any desktop. SOome display managers such as SDDM don't open the GNOME keyring at login.
Pro Not so difficult to customize
You just have to know which files to edit, and you can do quite a lot.
Cons
Con Very little consistency among different versions
There have been quite some changes that break the compatibility between Slim 2 and Slim 3. Even if you learned how to work with the Slim 2, you will find that Slim 3 requires re-training.
Con Dependency injection is too weak
It is not really dependency injection, but just a configurable container.
Con Needs strong bases to create dependencies
The dependency container schema of Slim is one of the biggest PROS and CONS of the framework. It is true that this schema brings so much flexibility to add anything, but another thing that is true is that you need to have strong bases of patterns, and an extensive knowledge of your libraries to convert it into a Slim dependency.
Con Too minimal
While it's true that Slim is a microframework, it's still too minimal. When used for throwaway projects or simple prototypes, it's perfect. But in the long run, it becomes less and less useful and you end up in implementing a full custom framework in trying to tackle all the missing features.
Con Tied to Gnome
You basically have to use Gnome or one of its forks to use it properly.
Con Really hard to customize
You'll have to recompile Gnome's resource files in order just to change the login background.
Con Depends on GTK and its dependencies
Con Ugly UI
It is very simple, and you can't change the layout.
Con Bloated
As with anything Gnome, there's a level of inelegance to be expected when it comes to absolute performance. It's supposed to be a login manager, not something bespoke.