[xmonad] Total Noob to Xmonad

[Michael Needham]

Greetings all;
I am brand new to TWMs altogether but have used UNIX and UNIX- like systems for a little over 30 years now. This has been both professionally and personally, I am a System Admin who also develops software.  The latter started in 1990 while in college, taking C++ and Java classes and through my part-time internship at my school, writing KSH scripts and data entry work on an IBM AIX server.

So I am learning Haskell and Rust now to round out my knowledge of many languages and using EndeavourOS (Arch based) Linux as my daily driver.

My machine is a 9+ year old HP Z400 Workstation with 16gb Ram and 500gb SSD.  Has some other various USB bits and bobs too all which show up fine running lsusb.

I have a very base install of Xmonad 0.17 (compiled from source) and the companion contrib also from source.  There is also Xmobar, dmenu and trayer installed.  It works, kind of.

Using keybindings I can run all apps from dmenu and the regular keys work.

My xmonad.hs is just an import of XMonad and defaults set to modMask = mon4Mask and terminal = “alacritty “.  I can get into Xmonad through startx ( which in .xinitrc the file is the supplied version from the EOS repository) with the last lines removed and added exec Xmonad).

Have to date tried 2 display login managers lightdm and sddm and this system was built initially with XFCE and that has been removed plus dependancies.  So Xmonad is the only de currently.  All the gtk and qt apps are still installed, and run from dmenu or invoked from CLI.

What happens is the dm of choice runs from systemctl just fine.  At login you get your dialog box and put in your password, then the machine tries to load the session and just drops you back to the login screen.  Upon disabling lightdm or sddm (no matter which, they both behave as described above) you can reboot from an alternate tty (eg cnttl-alt-f2) and reboot.  Have tried Xmonad —recompile from alt tty and this hangs the x-session running on tty 0 so I reboot from alt tty and rinse and repeat.  So currently the dm is disabled and I through much reading and watching a few tutorials as well as going through the Xmonad documentation, believe it is a PAM Authentication issue?  I do have lxsession installed and I think I need a little clarification on what exactly needs to go into Xmonad.hs as far as imports and perhaps hooks.  If I am wrong about my conclusion, please advise.  I currently have decided to go with sddm if anyone decides to reply.

Thank you for help in advance and please forgive me for my verbose post.   

Regards,
Michael Needham