Hello Brandon and Justin, Your comments were very useful, pointed out my misunderstandings/mental holes, and lead me on my way to further research. I started documenting my branching experiments in a vm, taking screenshots and notes at every step. Before I go off the grid or run out of steam, I just wanted to say Thanks. Maybe I'll have something to show for the efforts. My goal is to understand session managers, be able to dissect, mix and match the components of various desktop environments. I would like to have a minimal setup with conveniences such as wifi and not much more. I may prefer to login via console and start x and xmonad manually. I also want to support at least one other user who would likely be more comfortable with xmonad on a full desktop environment. I've scanned a few years of posts on this list and came across several relevant threads. Yet I wonder if there are good reference documents you can recommend describing the components, dis/advantages, dependencies, required to build a minimal or desktop environment from scratch? Otherwise, that's what I intend to write, but I'm certainly not the most experienced guy for the job. Cheers, Alex [ B068 ED90 F47B 0965 2953 9FC3 EE9C C4D5 3E51 A207 ]