Changing the image of your greeter/sddm face pic

Documentation
1

I’ll refer you to our manual

https://manual.lubuntu.me/stable/3/3.1/3.1.8/sddm_configuration.html?highlight=face

That link is for our latest stable release, which currently stands as Lubuntu 23.10; but if using 22.04 LTS for example you can change the stable in the URL to be lts and see the 22.04 manual page.

Thus for me to change the default ICON to be the image you see besides my name on this site, I used

cp -pv ~/Pictures/on_guard/smaller.jpg ~/.face.icon

That is exactly as covered in our manual, however due to additional security that exists on recent releases, a change in permissions (for sddm) requires an extra step the manual page (as it stands currently) doesn’t mention.

I also had to run

setfacl -m u:sddm:x /home/guiverc
setfacl -m u:sddm:r /home/guiverc/.face.icon

which gave the SDDM process (ie. our greeter or DM we use at login) access to my user directory (that is denied by default!)

I then restarted sddm forcing it to re-read the file (I was logged into a text terminal for above commands) and the picture appeared alongside my name at the greeter/login screen.

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2

There’s bug report on this to get it fixed in the manual:

The quickest way to do this is actually to put it in a more global location:
/var/lib/AccountsService/icons/$USER.face.icon
where $USER is your username, or what you get when you do whoami.

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