just for clarity, "Devuan" is the provider of curated software repositories that include all Debian software except systemd and dependent software. Everyone using Devuan is both free to choose and install the desktop setup, if any, they like to use. I believe it's even possible to install a couple of them on the one system, though it'd probably be slightly cumbersome to have several running at the same time as they have competing resource expectations. If you don't like xfce then don't use it. There is no reason to whinge about it.

Somehow you seem to have missed the brief that github is a Microsoft venture. Don't be there.

Well for a while I used xdm myself, of nostalgia perhaps, but on this last machine I've got lightdm with lxqt-session and then xfwm4 as window manager. My setup includes much of LxQt though I've swapped in xfce4-terminal which had more configurability in looks and behaviour (getting reduced it seems).

lightdm probably works for you, otherwise xdm is a simple and good "greeter". It's a function where "less is more".

Looking at sddm source, it appears the user session process is started by uid root, so the subsequent groups fiddling (getgroups) will merge root's groups with the user's and set that for the process. In short it seems to boil down to crappy design. You'd do well in opting for some other "display manager".

Ah, I messed up; meant that those lines would be in /etc/pam.d/sddm-greeter

As a suggestion, you might try editing /etc/pam.d/sddm to make the line

@include common-auth

be the two lines

@include common-auth
auth optional pam_group.so

I'm hoping that might make the login procedure via sddm more aligned with the procedure of tty login and in particular add a pam_group.so call that seems to be missing. Though it's kind of an untested wild guess so don't hold your breath.

Dynamic linking includes some version handling and it is common practice that after placing a lib in the lib collection(s), one runs ldconfig for reasons that are somewhat explained in

man ldconfig

ldconfig will then establish the "soname" link that the dynamic linker (ld.so) requires. There is also the documentation

man ld.so

that really represents 101 knowledge for us who want to understand.

Yeah, and others too. Your scale is not useful as it makes your language be an implied offense. Unless of course you want to show up as a rude prick.

Wasn't this thread started by yourself @Ron, as a question to the world about the motive behind a particular situation among the threads on this forum?

Therefore the thread ended up here, because I decided that that kind of discussion is more suited to this section.

Overall this, i.e. dev1galaxy.org, is a discussions forum of many section, and certain sections should be more focussed in their topics than others. It's not always easy to do that with the range of minds around here generating all sorts of posts to make threads floating in all sorts of directions. Yet I don't see any hands raised for taking on the moderator responsibility; just the odd whining by rando's.

@KindlyDoRight, after review and discussion we have decided that suspending is not warranted, and we welcome you back as forum member.

Onwards we want to remind you and everyone about the virtue of minimalism both in content and count of forum posts. We moderators prefer to avoid moderating against personal style but rather prefer that people self-adjust towards a coherent and pleasant discussions forum on Devuan related matters. And to be sure: AI generated posts are not acceptable.

@KindlyDoRight as noted by golinux, we think your postings are generated. Your account is currently suspended. Please email me to discuss.

"pain points" ?? "friction" ?? What are you talking about?