I would like to move away from Gnome, which I don't need at all since I only need to launch: - emacs - conkeror - thunderbird - gnome-terminal and I don't even use the menu but Alt-f2 for that. The main problem though is that on this laptop (a dell latitude E6420) if I'm not using gnome I can't make it suspend properly. The strange thing is that if I am in a gnome-session closing the lid or calling suspend from the gnome menu everything works. But if I fire up awesome only then closing the lid doesn't work anymore. So the question is, what is gnome magically firing up that other window managers don't? I would also like to try xmonad finally, but I've never been able to configure it yet. I have an ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs file (the default one copied) that compiles perfectly, but if I try a startx the screen just stays blank, without logging any error in the Xorg.0.log. Any idea of what it could be?