In the third (3rd) installment of this tutorial series, I’ll discuss environment concerns/ requirements as well as implementation evaluation and components.
To begin, I’ll enumerate what I consider (for me) as critical user constraints.
Advice: It is always crucial to know what you want to accomplish before undertaking a major project or development.
The following list represents the major user and software support functions I want on my systems. Obviously, your list may be different from mine.
Here we go with my list (I’ve included tiny notes in parens.):
- Dropbox (to synchronizes across my devices and provide reliable backup)
- VirtualBox (to provide an environment for my Win-based genealogy software applications)
- System status reporting (bashtop/bpytop, slstatus, & conky)
- Easy keybinding (sxhkd, config.h)
- quick system menu access (dmenu, rofi)
- quick system help access (zenity)
- functional, low resource terminal (st)
- wallpaper and color changing aka. eye-candy (pywal, simple- suckless terminal)
- simple audio recording (gnome-audio-recorder)
- sound ‘suite’ (avidemux, ardour)
Additional items I want my systems to accommodate include:
- easy multi-monitor support (I find dwm to be amazingly functional & easy here.)
- simple window tiling (This works very well in dwm, once you understand dwm’s approach & functions.)
- fun to use (purely subjective)
- easy to make it look good (also subjective)
As part of setting the system environment up, I established for myself a “shopping list” of major distro requirements /preferences. The list below represents those factors I considered and used to drive my final distro selection.
I decided that I wanted to build my environment on the distro which best supported and offered the following:
- An active community of expert tiling window manager (wm) users
- Current (up-to-date) “Tiling Window Manager” (twm) software
- Excellent online support facilities including Wiki, Forum, etc.
- Ready (easy?) modification, tailorability
- Regular reliable, release cycles- Long term release cycles (LTS) were not desirable. To me, LTS seem inconsistent with evolving wm technology(ies).
- I always prefer to using a non-systemd init based distribution. From my perspective, systemd is tolerable but never preferable.
- A release which will run effectively on my two platforms
- Low-resource use (RAM, CPU); again, this is purely subjective.
Now for the list of distros I evaluated (The numbers following the distro name indicate areas of weakness based on my above listed distro requirements):
- LinuxMint (ubuntu derivative)- 1, 2, 4, 6, 8
- PopOS (ubuntu derivative)- 1, 2, 4, 6, 8
- EndeavourOS (arch derivative)- 1, 6, 7
- ArchLabs (arch derivative)- 6, 7
- anti-X (debian derivative)- 1, 2, 3, 4, 7
- BunsenLabs (debian derivative)- 1, 2, 4, 6, 7
- Void (independent)- 1, 3, 6, 7
- ubuntu (debian derivative)- 1, 2, 4, 6, 8
- manjaro (arch derivative)- 3, 6, 8
- SparkyLinux (debian derivative)- 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7
- devuan (debian derivative)- 1, 2, 4, 6, 7
- Artix (arch derivative)- 3, 6, 7
- Trident (void derivative)- 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7
The two finalists were:
- MXLinux (debian derivative)- 1, 4
- Arch Linux (independent)- 6 (the winner)
Given the above list of functional desires, I had to research and find the various bits from which to construct my system. What follows are those tools/ apps I elected to use in building my environment (Desktop):
- sxhkd (Simple X hotkey daemon from Baskerville)
- dmenu (menu panel from suckless)
- slstatus (status tray from suckless)
- dwm (window manager from suckless)
- rofi (pop-up/ dmenu tool from davatorium)
- zenity (pop-up tool from gnome)
- conky (help on the desktop from Brendan Matthews)
- i3lock-fancy (screen lock app from meskarune)
- xautolock (to time-out & lock screen)
- lxsession (from lxqt in order to use lxpolkit)
- lxsession (lxpolkit from lxsession)
- bashmount (console based mount/ dismount app from jamielinux)
- bpytop (console based CPU/Disk Reporting from aristocratos)
- st (from suckless, Luke Smith’s custom tailored version)
- dunst (notifier from the dunst-project)
- hblock (in order to keep web adverts at bay from hectorm)
There are obviously many more apps in the environment I built; but, these are critical to the infrastructure I wanted. In the next installment of the series, I’ll provide dotfiles and setup guides.
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Remember, like with all of my work, I am able to provide the following assurance(s):
- It is almost certainly going to work until it breaks; although I have to admit it may never work and that would be sad.
- When/if it does break, you may keep all of the pieces.
- If you find my materials helpful, both you & I will be happy, at least for a little while.
- My advice is worth every penny you paid for it!
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