Comment 11 for bug 844044

Thomas,

"We want a user list *and* we want the ability to enter a user-name by hand" - could you define who "we" are and some use-cases where you have a list of users and and also other accounts not in the list but useful to log in as?

LightDM (and by extension Unity Greeter) assumes if the OS provides a list of user accounts (via getpwent()) then that provides all the possible accounts available on that system. From the getpwent manual page:

"The getpwent() function returns a pointer to a structure containing the broken-out fields of a record from the password database (e.g., the local password file /etc/passwd, NIS, and LDAP)"

The "greeter-hide-users" option in lightdm.conf requests that the greeter hide the list of users (even if it is provided by the OS) and instead show a manual entry. The emphasis is not on showing the manual entry, that is merely what the greeter does if there appears to be no users on the system (bug 919298 fixed this). It's not a "show user-name entry" option.