[arch-general] moving away from gnome

[Andrea Crotti]

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?