I have noticed that if I run xwmconfig as a normal user, any changes won't stick. Of course if I run it as root, the changes do stick but the WM is changed for all users.

Evidently xwmconfig only changes the xinitrc.<WM> file that the link xinitrc points to in the /etc/X11/xinit/ directory.

I was under the impression that if a user had a .xinitrc file in his home directory then that file would determine which WM I would get to use. However, copying the appropriate xinitrc.<WM> file, editing it and making it executable made no difference. The system stubbornly insists on reading from /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. I even deleted /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc with the result that I had no init file.

In order to configure my startup, I have had to edit the appropriate file in /etc/X11/xinit/ but of course the changes then become global (too bad for the other users ).

Am I doing something wrong?

xwmconfig should copy the selected /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.<WM> file to ~/.xinitrc (if you launch it as root it creates the /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc link, changing the default wm for the system), so you should have your personal wm if you start the system in runlevel 3 and then startx.
if you are using runlevel 4 as default (graphical login) and so also a desktop manager (like gdm, kdm, lxdm, slim and so on), this parses your available /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.* files and let you select the desktop session to start from the desktop manager itself, between the choices it find in your system: in this case xwmconfig isn't useful, because the ~/.xinitrc file isn't read.

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Interesting. Don't have slackware box right now to try it. But did you just try onliner eg. in .xinitrc file instead of copying from /etc/ ?

Editonce, makes sense. Thanks.

Got it. GUI login overlooks .xinitrc (even if my login manager is xdm). Since I don't currently have a practical need for runlevel 3, other users will just have to like what I like. (Should I mark this solved)?

@saivnoba, I didn't need a one liner. My .xinitrc was sufficiently different from the system files that I could tell which file was being read.
(Oh, I see you have just seen @ponce's post. I still welcome your contribution).

a personal advice: if you want to let you users choose their wm, lxdm and slim are *very* lightweight (if you got concern about that) and pretty easy to setup too.
after installing the package, you have only to remember to add the check for the one you select at the top of /etc/rc.d/rc.4

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When you use run level 4 and a login manager, each user's preferred environment is stored in $HOME/.dmrc. The login manager will allow each user to select a preferred environment and store that information in $HOME/.dmrc.

In run level 3 non-root users use the xwmconfig tool to copy an xinitrc file from /etc/X11/xinit to the user's home directory. The /usr/bin/startx command will source that file when starting X.

Login managers use *.desktop files to list the available environments. For example, look in the /usr/share/apps/kdm/sessions directory. In those desktop files will be a directive for which script or binary to run to start that environment.

The login manager will source additional files/scripts. If you look at /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc you will see various files located in the same directory that get sourced.

The run level 3 and 4 sourcing of scripts is different but achieve the same goal.

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ops, thanks for puntualizing

Thanks for that. slim proved to be just what I needed. This thread is now solved.