I do not have and addiction problem, you have a problem with my addiction.
Is it too much to ask for the days when my system was nothing but a prompt in which I may or may not type “startx”?
I always ran startx & exit to prevent someone from VT switching to a logged in console if my screen was locked :)
Hah that’s what I always had on Debian on my laptop back in the version 9 days (buster?). Nothing’s stopping you from doing it now with runlevels. I think with systemd it’s just systemctl set-default multiuser.target
You can then always get the full boot with systemctl isolate graphical.target
Might not be the exact command but it’s something like that for sure.
The default systemd target to boot into can be overriden from the kernel command line.
If the GUI ever gets broken, having a such fallback boot entry just for the (VT) console mode is invaluable. (The boot-entry can reuse the same kernel and initrd images from the regular boot.)
I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I have settled into a stable system, configured 99.9% how I want it. Seeing diminishing returns on effort put into tweaking it. But I just keep looking at window managers. I have people who need me in the world but I just can’t stop looking at them. I don’t know what to do.
Every year or so I fire up a VM, install a window manager on it, realize I have no idea WTF I’m doing, and nuke the VM and go back to my regular KDE desktop.
I used to do the same, but recently I’ve found a dustro and window manager that just work for me. The distro is Fedora atomic, and the window manager is sway.
I pretty much just used a floating window manager like a tiling one, almost always snapping them to 1/2 or 1/3 of the screen. Eventually I tried sway, and after learning some of the shortcuts, it seems like the perfect window manager for someone like me.
I’m in the same boat so I started getting my “tweaking” fix by making my own themes. Just got my first cursor theme working and it’s awesome!
Sweet! I’ve experimented with installing a few bits from gnome look but haven’t made any of my own. How difficult is it? I’ve managed to theme my favourite terminal applications though. A big part of my satisfaction is based on feeling, a large part of which is visual. Diehard instrumentalists may look down on me for it but I am unashamed and not alone.
Honestly, it’s way more convoluted and frustrating than it has any right to be. The only tools I found were cursor-toolbox which allows you to convert SVG templates to the correct set of PNGs and xcursorgen which converts the PNGs to actual cursor files. It took me several tries just get a working cursor set. Then I spent much much longer actually drawing and tweaking my theme using inkscape. It was certainly rewarding to get it working though. Now I smile every time I see the little “busy” animation.
What do you use? I’m happy with i3 and haven’t looked at other window managers in a while.
Don’t forget to switch your wm atleast once a year for no reason.
So true. Sway forever.
I love Sway, but Hyprland’s special workspace thing is just so damn good.
Meh, hyprland devs and community are known for being toxic, specially with minorities. Can’t use because of this :/
Yeah but Hyprland window groups tend to eat each other with the dwindle layout
Same. It also has option to open an app when an empty workspace is opened. It’s just so convenient compared to sway which is very solid but also feels quite limiting like i3.
well, i3 never failed me, compared to a bit buggy kde experience
