What would happen if lightdm-gtk-greeter were removed? I don’t mean as a way to get around anything or fix some issue, but just in general. What would the result be?
I don’t know, but I do know how to find out.
You would not be able to boot into your desktop environment anymore by way of the graphical login screen. You would have to start the GUI manually from the command line in a tty.
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Alright, here’s a follow up question: Is there a way for me to disable it without fully removing it? I’ve already tried disabling lightdm with systemctl, but when I log in and start lightdm manually, I’m put to the greeter screen. Which, you know, is annoying because I’m already logged in…
And that’s it? No other ramifications?
That’s exactly what lightdm-gtk-greeter does. It’s the login screen. 
Well, removing it would cause dependency issues. But you can disable it as follows, provided that you are completely logged out of the GUI… 
sudo systemctl disable --now lightdm-gtk-greeter
Why not just do it?
(to) See
and experience the result?
My question to you would be:
Why would you want to do it?
There will be a result.
What did you expect that to be?
Well, removing it would cause dependency issues. But you can disable it as follows, provided that you are completely logged out of the GUI…
sudo systemctl disable --now lightdm-gtk-greeter
I’m still learning how exactly systemctl works. When I looked for a unit named lightdm-gtk-greeter, it told me that no such unit exists. Clearly, there’s something I’m not understanding here…
indeed 
Why not just do it?
(to) See
and experience the result?
I’ve learned from shooting myself in the foot on more than one occasion that “just doing” something without fully understanding what the possible results could be is often detrimental.
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Very helpful and mature response, thank you for that.
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I know that you meant it to be read as … whatever is not physical
…alright. Anyways, the reason why I want to do it is because it’s annoying the have to log in again after already having logged in from the tty.
It seems that what you actually want is auto-login. See this article (Section 5.5) for instructions.
I was assuming that it would have been a .service file, but the package doesn’t appear to contain one, and I don’t use lightdm-gtk-greeter, so I cannot look for it on my own computer.
Have you tried…
systemctl list-unit-files | grep lightdm
…?
I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean. You can have multiple tty logins going at the same time alongside of your GUI. In order to switch to your Xfce session, you don’t have to start another display manager session, but simply use AltF7.
In addition to that, if you do not have a GUI session running already, then the command to start an Xfce session does not involve lightdm-greeter-gtk. The command should be something along the lines of startxfce4.
Again, I don’t use Xfce, so I cannot verify any of this on my own machine.
Edit: Yes, the command to start an Xfce session from the tty is indeed…
startxfce4
This does not require you to log in via the greeter.
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That makes absolutely no sence.
Yes. lightdm.service is the on;y thing that comes up, nothing else.
Yes, I am aware. So, essentially what I am doing/want to do is have all graphical elements disabled on boot. I would prefer to login to my computer via tty (which occur when lightdm is disabled on boot via systemctl) and keep it running exclusively in the CLI until I choose to run graphics. This works fine, except that when I startx after I’ve already loggin into a tty session, the light-gtk-greeter comes up and I have to log in again. It’s annoying. And I’m not even sure why it does that because I’m literally already logged in. Which brings me back to the original idea that if I disable or remove light-gtk-greeter altogether, this will not occur. Since I’m not logging into my computer via GUI anyways, the idea that I won’t be able to log in graphically is a non-issue for me. Does this sort of clear things up on what I’m trying to accomplish?
In that case, the command to disable it is…
sudo systemctl disable --now lightdm
From there on, your system will always boot up to a tty. And in order to start an Xfce session, you would then not use startx but startxfce4.
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That provided the exact result I was looking for, could not have been better. Thank you very much for your patience and time. I am curious, though. Why is it startxfce4 and not startx? It used to be startx on every other XFCE system I’ve used (Arch, Garuda, Xubuntu).
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The code in startx — which is a shell script — was changed a number of years ago already to start the default display manager, and as the name of the script implies, on an X11 session.
People may however want to run a Wayland session instead, and so the code to start the desktop environments without a display manager was moved out of startx and into separate scripts that invoke the display server people prefer, be it X11 or Wayland.