SDDM being an (almost) unmitigated PITA

[Ralphred]

Now, I've used SDDM since XDM has been ugly and GDM has had a longer depgraph than George Floyd's jacket.
But now it's being obtuse:

MinimumVT=
Minimum virtual terminal number that will be used by the first display. Virtual terminal num‐
ber will increase as new displays added. This setting is no longer available since SDDM
v0.20.

and from the git repo README:

VIRTUAL TERMINALS
SDDM is assumed to start at the tty specified by the cmake variable SDDM_INITIAL_VT which is an integer and defaults to 1.

If SDDM_INITIAL_VT wasn't available, SDDM will use the next available one instead.

You can override SDDM_INITIAL_VT if you want to have a different one if, for example, you were planning on using tty1 for something else.

Obviously "sorting out an ebuild" to specify a different SDDM_INITIAL_VT is childsplay in Gentoo, so I did it, but it doesn't work.
Reading the open issues leads me to believe that the sddm devs are more interested in jumping through hoops designed for intellectual gymnastics so that asking your greeter to open on a defined VT is less than "a valid use case", rather than fixing the actual issue of not being able to specify a VT on which SDDM should open. and as such we are entering #NotABug territory.

I'm not into playing games with the disingenuous (this is not up for debate, leave me the fsck alone), can anyone recommend a non-ugly greeter with a sensible depgraph before I mask and archive above the (soon to exist) ::local copy of the 0.19.0 sddm ebuild?

[Ralphred]

Well, it's still a PITA, and hacking the code about to force rejection of any tty below SDDM_INITIAL_VT still didn't work, I must be missing something in the flow of the program.

I did "make it behave" by moving the getty terminal lines for tty{2-6} above the definition for for the default runlevel in /etc/inittab. I'm sure I'll learn about any consequences of this further down the line, but for now it's forced to open on 7 as anything lower is "unavailable" to it at run time.

Why do all this you ask, because I have specific scripts that run for specific users depending on what tty they log into, and I don't need my GUI popping up on random ttys when using runlevels to switch between use cases too, it makes the cleanup scripts messy.

[szatox]

I've been using slim for ages.
Pretty basic, and some versions have a funny visual bug (user and password input might be visible at the same time, but you still have to use enter to move forward rather than tab), but overall works for me.
It drops you to bare X11 by default; select your desired DE by pressing F1 at login screen or configure it to use your preferred DE yourself.