I am sick of GNOMEs bullshit.
Setantae recommended wmii -
I glanced at it a while back but mistook it for a ratpoison clone.
Ratpoision didn’t play nice with GIMP and the ‘1 app per desktop’ model meant you were forever switching views.
wmii is a lot nicer: sane default layouts, easy adjustments, and it uses 9P for IPC (the ruby wrapper is the icing on the cake). It’s < 10000 lines of code, which makes it the Camping of window managers.
First, I stopped using network manager (I hardly ever connect to different WLANs) and went back to a system-wide WPA setup .
All I neeeded was to set a DVORAK layout at login and I’d be happy.
Sadly, GDM contracted the Open Source disease of reimplementing everything. It doesn’t read ~/.xsession, instead using system-wide ‘foo.desktop’ files. As if this hadn’t all been solved when I was 10.
I would skip a display manager altogether, but other people use the box and I’d like to be a good neighbour.
This seems to work without needing to hack around in /etc/X11 :
$ sudo apt-get install wmii
$ # logout, choose 'wmii' session at GDM and log back in
$ cd
$ cat > .dmrc
[Desktop]
Session=custom
$ cat > .xinitrc
setxkbmap dvorak&
# add your own stuff here
exec wmii
$ ln -s .xinitrc .xsession