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Controlling display of users on the logon screen in Linux Mint 20.3

Published on 15th February 2022 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Recently, I tried using Commento with a static website that I was developing and this needed PostgreSQL rather than MySQL or MariaDB, which many content management tools use. That meant a learning curve that made me buy a book as well as the creation of a system account for administering PostgreSQL. These are not the kind of things that you want to be too visible so I wanted to hide them.

Since Linux Mint uses AccountsService, you cannot use lightdm to do this (the comments in /etc/lightdm/users.conf suggest as much). Instead, you need to go to /var/lib/AccountsService/users and look for a file called after the user name. If one exists, all that is needed is for you to add the following line under the [User] section:

SystemAccount=true

If there is no file present for the user in question, then you need to create one with the following lines in there:

[User]
SystemAccount=true

Once the configuration files are set up as needed, AccountsService needs to be restarted and the following command does that deed:

sudo systemctl restart accounts-daemon.service

Logging out should reveal that the user in question is not listed on the logon screen as required.

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