Turn Your Window Manager Into A Desktop Environment
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 ธ.ค. 2020
- So you installed a stand-alone window manager, but a window manager is not a desktop environment. It's just window manager. It manages windows. It DOES NOT manage notifications, clipboards, volume controls, bluetooth, etc. You have to install programs to do those tasks.
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Turning a WM into a DE, but not bloated as much as actual DEs.
It's cause it does not have a settings app
@Brahma Sharma nvim
or use xfce
@@reveluv8851 make your own
As an XFCE user I'd say your comment doesn't make sense. :)
Okay now lets turn our desktop environment into a window manager
LOL, that’s funny, that’s actually a good one dude
That was a great explanation of the difference between WM and DE...I never fully understood this until now
yep, knew the difference conceptually, but never really thought about it this way. not sure I have the patience to roll my own desktop. In my early career I battled X constantly to stop it from going all -- well, broken. X “won” and I gave up on Linux as a workstation. It’s still by far the best server platform. Either way, this definitely helps illuminate the mess of stuff running with the WM on a typical pre-built Linux distro.
ala carte. that is how I like to live my life. it is harder at first, but easier in the long run.
@@czjornymurzyn You don't count BSDs as daily driver OS's but you do count macOS as a (mostly) FreeBSD and NetBSD based OS as a daily driver? Why?
@@czjornymurzyn Yeah, you seem to be correct, on both aspects.
"I don't use a desktop environment. What I actuall use is the LXDE desktop environment, but I install each component by hand." -- DT
I'm just messing with you, great video as usual. I learned something about lxsession, I learned that AwesomeWM and DWM have their own built-in panels, system trays, and launchers.
I actually started using i3 gaps on every one of my computers, and I really love using xfce-panel and many applications from the xfce family because of performance, theming and consistency
I'd also recommend Nemo for file managers. It's quite small (9.88 MB, not far from pcmanfm's 6.48 MB and thunar's 6.44 MB), and not a lot of dependencies either. However, it has great search functionality (which thunar lacks), responds well to mouse forward and back buttons (which pcmanfm lacks), and it looks great as well. If you want to add search functionality through catfish, you'd end up with another 2.15MB and will be close to the size of Nemo.
Nemo and Caja are nearly very similar
Thunar recently got search functionality.
I use mostly either ranger (Terminal based fm) or none at all (I basically use Terminal only most of the time) with the exception when i search for pictures or videos on my system.
I used pcmanfm and Thunar since i switched away from Ubuntu years ago. Today when i use a fm for the purpose mentioned above (Picture and video search), i use Thunar or pcmanfm.
maybe it's a new feature for pcmanfm but mouse forward and back buttons are working on pcmanfm atm
You must be very careful with disk space lol
I remember back in 2018 when I was first getting into Linux, my first distro was Ubuntu 18.04, all the 18.04 flavors of ubuntu had just come out. I had tried that for about a month before I found an older one of your videos explaining how to install openbox on a minimalist install of debian. After I got that all up and running I really loved openbox, so I naturally started distro hopping to discover more about Linux. Now 2 years later I would say I have an intermediate knowledge of Linux, tried out tiling window managers (wasn't for me) and now my favorite distros are Debian with Openbox and PopOS. I'm one of those weird people who not only likes the gnome 3 desktop, but I like it in it's stock configuration. I am perfectly comfortable in either one of those, but really at this point, I can live in just about anything. Thanks DT for getting me into Linux!
Been running xmonad for about two weeks thanks to your videos. Will never go back to a desktop environment or floating window manager
I wish I had this when I first made the jump to arch+i3 because it would have saved me a ton of stress, but on the other hand it was a really interesting couple of hours of research
DTDE
Distro Tube Desktop Environment😅👌
Yeah, Openbox x Xmonad
Aokwoakwo dtwm 🤠
For file managers there's SpaceFM which I believe started as a fork of PCmanFM. It has a ton of nerdy options. It's too busy for my taste but if you want epic customization in a GUI then it delivers
Thank you for making this guide. I am trying to get an old computer set up with Arch, and this should help me to get a basic DE up and running when I need it to.
Out of pure need (because of a sh**ty asus laptop that is becoming obsolete and incapable of basic stuff after just 4 years!) I just discovered your amazing videos about linux window managers! Some of them were not strange to me, I've "lived" with iceWM on an old Toshiba Satellite a decade ago and I knew LXDE and openbox... but with your help I'm diving real deep into i3 and openbox.
Right now, I'm using a pure openbox experience in Debian Buster with the other wm installed being i3 - the machine it's not complaining at all, I'm very pleased with how things are going.
None of this would be possible without your truly great videos - the way you explain, the «hands on» approach, I've learned a lot in a few days and that made possible to fully recover this laptop and probably make it function for a few more years.
So thank you very much, cheers from Portugal and, please, forgive any mistake or typo since English it's not my native language ;-)
Of course, channel subscribed, one of my newest favs :-D
thumbs up for the extra information DT provide throughout the video. I was using balenaEtcher yesterday but wasn't able to format the drive .... watched this video and probably polkit is the issue. Thank you that DT :)
TWMs seem daunting when starting to watch your comprehensive guide you made, but this made it seem more approachable. Thank you
Thank you for making the video to answer all my questions,
It's amazing how fast i learned Linux without having to go into the distro hopping faze or struggling to find what i want from my Desktop/Laptop thanks to people like you.
I have a minimalist Arch Linux on BTRFS, Fish Shell and using your rice configs but slightly tweaked for laptop with brightness, battery etc.
Using multiple WMs:
- Qtile
- Spectrwm
You were right, Thanks to Qtile amazing documentation, i pretty much added all what i needed into the config and have it on the bar, Aside from Bluetooth (blueman) to manage BT connections for Mouse, EarBuds, Speaker,
Amazing to have all i need in less than 800 Packages installation.
Thank you DistroTube !
I've been looking for a volume systray icon forever, thank you dt for this, something useful to my i3 config!
Nice T-Shirt !! And congrats for all your content! You rocks!
Great content. I'm debating ditching a DE for a WM instead. Great explanation.
I tried to use your xmonad some time ago but xmonad didn’t start. It had something today with you using multiple monitors. I could not figure out how to get the settings right for just one monitor. Have to dig deeper I guess. Thanks for this video. As always, a pleasure to watch.
Amazing video as always DT
This conversation is the epitome of "why do I need to know this as a new Linux user?" I didn't even understand the difference b/w WM and DE and when I did hear it I didn't understand why I would want to pick all those things on my own anyway. I mean... who cares!? Luckily I am starting to see the light (as a new Linux user). Thanks for the info.
Hey DT. You should delve into the differences/nuances of OpenRC, runit, s6 init and systemd.
*Vietnam war flashback
The first three are init systems. The last one is an NSA backdoor into Linux.
@@johnterpack3940 source?
@@phillipanselmo8540 no source. systemd hate nowadays is just a hate train, people hate it and not even they know why. i understand why some are mad with systemd, its not just an init system it's a whole suite. while something like runit on void is built for nothing but speed. i personally never had issues with systemd but i get why some are upset.
I use OpenBox WM with Xfce4 panel and PCManFM for file browsing and desktop icons/background. Also, some other stuff from LXDE, Xfce and MATE (like lxappearance, lxrandr, lxterminal, xfce4-power-manager, engrampa, mate-screensaver or xfce4-screensaver, mate-screenshot etc).
I highly recommend the mate file manager caja, its fast, it doesn't have many dependencies, and unlike thunar and pcmanfm it has a fully functional and intergrated search, it also has handy features like it plays audio files when you hover your mouse over them.
I rarely use GUI file managers, but I really like the XFE file manager. Minimal, few dependencies, and works well.
Nemo is better than Dolphin
Excellent video Derek!!! LOVE your desktop background!!! Where did you get from?😀
Im pretty sure you can get all his wallpapers from his GIT repo's
Hi DT ! Great video! I liked your blouse!! Beatles forever!
Hey, DT. Thanks for your videos and the quality information you provide! Do you think you could make a video, showing what programs we need to run in a Window Manager? I know about nitrogen, or sxhkd, but I'm confused as to what other programs can be shown in the system tray. For example, how can I display the language applet, and what is the application that I could customize the language on the keyboard. I have them ready-made in xfce, but maybe there is another more minimal one like nitrogen for wallpapers. Or get notifications and have them displayed. I've never used a Window Manager and every time I watch a video I just see ready-made configurations and shortcuts. Personally I'd like to install a minimal Debian Stable and add only those programs I need. I know that maybe I'm asking too much and maybe such a video would be exhaustive, to show how to configure i3 or i3gaps or bspwm from scratch, but I tried. :-) Maybe it is such a video made by you and I missed it, then I apologize for the trouble.
Really like your videos! High quality, tiling only. CLI first. Still love KDE Plasma though...
It's hard to get off Plasma. I tried for a while to mess with QTile and Awesome after watching some DT videos, but just couldn't get into them.
Now, this is quality content. Next up how to configure GtK and Qt?
yes we need this video next
Good one, will do this myself eventually... Thanks
Thanks for your configuration. I made some customization and used it on my openSUSE, it works well.
Although I understand that people don't like electron (and I just use neovim), I'd suggest for using vscodium or atom. I think that's what a new user usually expects for an IDE, instead of notepadqq or gedit
Code editors and text editors are 2 different things. You don't want to wait 2-3 seconds for a text file with 5 lines to load. Also, on a low end desktop/laptop vscode and atom are the last programs you'd want to use as a text editor.
@@jungliflower Yes, that's what I said "for an IDE". I use neovim as both the text editor and the "IDE". When people ask me about an IDE to use, they are normally referring to something to vscode, atom or jetbrains (of course, that's just my personal experience). I would not recommend gedit or notepad++ to anyone, text editor or code editor, though.
gedit is pretty good
To the guy who asked about bluetooth, yes the bluez package PLUS the blueman package might be the combination you want 😌
Great channel DT!! What mic 🎤 are you using ? Sorry if you already answered the question
Back-end/System Programs
2:52 - Panels
4:59 - Policy Kit Program (polkit)
6:32 - Nitrogen (desktop background manager)
7:29 - Picom (compositor)
8:04 - System Tray program suite (individual programs used to run a system tray)
9:04 - (background daemons)
10:32 - Notification daemons
11:15 - Login Manager (for multiple window manager managing)
GUI Programs
11:35 - PCManFM (File Manger)
12:06 - Gtk Setter (?)
12:59 - xterm Terminal (most WMs expect this terminal to be present, just install alongside what terminal emulator you want to use)
13:36 - Run Launchers (dmenu + your choice)
14:19 - text editors
BONUS
14:57 - Bluetooth (if you can get it to run)
Very educational. Thanks
I did a Debian 12 base install. Unchecked everything in the tasksel menu, so it was just the base system. After that I installed awesome, alacrity, lxappearance, a few other things, and when i do download a file manager, they all required 300 - over 700MB, however Thunar only requied a bit over 70MB. Im sure this was mostly due to dependancies, so it may make sense to test how much an install would take, as long as its a tool you can be flexible with choosing.
I saw one guy get around the xterm soft dependency problem simply by using a symlink from xterm to his actual emulator. I bet that would work for most such soft dependencies.
Currently using Manjaro i3 community edition & I thought I would hate using a wm, It's quite fun learning the hotkeys & what not though. First window manager I've ever used & it's definitely a change of pace. I haven't even attempted to change anything in config files, too afraid of breaking the install immediately.
Thanks for this, I was waiting for a video dealing with this topic
About the login manager, the one i like to use is ly. It is a ncurses login manager. I like it because i like in general the tty stuff. Before i switched to Linux years ago and still had a windows machine, i was often Tinkering with DOSbox mostly because i like the text based environments. (Maybe it sounds weird but i just love to work with that stuff) The only way to make something more simplistic would be using the "startx" command.
(When i do not search for a video or picture or use discord or firefox on my machine, i use nearly always terminal based programs such as ranger as file manager)
Take a look at pywal or python-wal (package). In my opinion is the best wallpaper setter for any VM, it’s just amazing. It can set up all theming colorscheme (i3, dwm, rofi, polybar, dwm, terminals and many many more, xmonad also I think) to automatically to match your wallpaper. Widespread this magnificent software please.
@Learn Linux because of the theming part. Change your wallpaper and almost everything on your desktop matches the wallpaper automatically.
awesome, Peace!
Unclutter, numlockx, imwheel, caffeine - these are some useful programs as well.
Drinking game:
Drink a shot every time he says window manager
I'm not tryin to die today.....but challenge accepted.
I while ago I switched to sway which is a wayland compositor that mostly behaves like i3. I find it to be less laggy than i3, so really enjoy it. My requirements are simple compared to most people. I don't use panels and I don't want a titlebar, just a 1px border. I don't need gaps either. Basically, the window manager should stay out of the way so that I can work in Emacs. I do use a few other programs: a browser, Anki, vice and FS-UAE. Sway is snappy, doesn't make my life difficult and suits my workflows perfectly, so I'm sticking with it for the time being. I tried EXWM, which you'd think should be just right, but no. I prefer Sway.
Speaking of file managers, the only one I ever really liked was ROX filer. Some time ago it was in the AUR, not sure if it's still there. I mostly use dired, but when I'm adding cards to Anki I sometimes use pcmanfm to drag/drop images and audio files. I must say pcmanfm gets the job done. I can get rid of all the clutter (sidebar etc.) and I'm left with something quite useful. I kind of like Thunar as well, but pcmanfm feels more compact.
wayland is amazing just a little undercooked still
Your pronunciation of Herbstluft is pretty funny. ^^
More like "Herbstluft mit Kraut" or "Herbstkraut," hehe. :d Or maybe "Krautluft WM." 🌿
(I also say it either English pronunciation from not thinking about it. 🦊💙 )
@Learn Linux ☎️ - "AH! Must correct to English...." ^^
Thanks for sharing
I would love to know what your recording setup is i feel that your sound is really good. So would be interesting to know your setup.. hardware and software. Anyone know if it is listed somewhere?
Hey distroTube, can you make a video on using a standalone WM as a day-to-day system including MS teams and stuff ? Using those apps without a system tray is kinda unnerving. Like you essentially don't get any notification anywhere unless you open the app
You should have a look at sway and its ecosystem. Wayland used to be immature in regards to software but its getting better and better every day.
Could you please make a video about your lightdm configuration?
Great video for people new in the WM only world! In my case, the only missing thing with WM is how to manage screens dynamically. I mean laptop + a potential external screen that is connected/disconnected, when the lid is closed, etc... At this day I haven't found any solution
Dwm has it all setup (with a bit of xorg configuration)
@@peterarbeitsloser7819 Oh really?? Is it a patch or is it builtin? Do you know if there are other WM that can also do it?
@@thomasa5717 dwm has it builtin.each monitor has its own set of 9 tags. awesome and i3 have great multi display support as well. you just need to configure xorg properly. you can use arandr(gui) as well.
what are those bullet points on Grideselect and others, is that a vim plugin? or is it emacs only?
Hey DT, how do you manage sessions in stand alone window managers? Like I want the desktop to look the exact same after shutdown and restart as when I left it?
Need to get Xmonad set up, currently on Herbstluftwm but have been getting into Haskell for other reasons.
I normally start with someone else's config, but that is because I don't know much haskell. I use picom and polybar, with a custom script to get the workspaces on my bar. I have heard rofi and dmenu work well, but ulauncher is what I currently have. Good luck!
Thanks for the vids. Is that a video/GIF animation or a script running the matrix rain screen on the monitor behind you?
Also, what file manager (compatible with Cinnamon Desktop) do you recommend for thumbnail display of music/image/video files?
You can get the matrix program by installing cmatrix. It should be available to you on most distributions.
matrix -->> archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/cmatrix/
xscreensaver also comes with a matrix emulation, GLmatrix which is nicer but uses more ressources
might be already installed on your cinnamon, else I would recommend since it has a lot of functionality and is easy to use. I prefer .
@@Daste745 Thanks.
@@tinygriffy Thanks for all the suggestions.
Very helpful buddy,😄
Nemo from Cinnamon is also a respectable file manager option.
You can also use ffmpeg to record your screen. Few people use it because they say OBS is bloated
guis are bloated
@@sergsergesrgergseg web browsers are GUIs
Ah, LightDM is great. Much easier to configure than LXDM.
totally agree
Awesome can set a background by itself...
Isn't that awesome...
Thanks!
+ Only problem I found with PCManFM is it doesn't work very well over network shares - for instance when changing a filename over the network it doesn't refresh the screen so you have to back out of the folder and go back into it to see the changes. Thunar does not have this problem. So I always went with Thunar instead.
+ Love Alacritty, don't like Dmenu instead I prefer Rofi but I customize to fit a nice dark look and it pops up in the center instead of the very top. Oh, and you can add other custom Rofi shortcuts outside of just showing your apps - like I configured it to display all most used config files so I can easily open them up without manually going to each folder and also I made a shortcut for searching files.
+ One thing I always have an issue with is vim - with copy and paste. If I copy something in vim from one terminal window I can't paste it in another terminal window in vim. I hate having to open vim in split screen mode as my only recourse for this. Never found a solution or at least one I could figure out to this problem.
+ I love my i3-gaps with polybar, alacritty, and rofi but I'm also enjoying my very configurable KDE Plasma 5.20 as well.
Hello @Distrotube thank you do much for this video. I have a couple of questions, do you know where I can find a comprehensive list of each of package I can add to a window manager by category? And do you know where I can find a deep tutorial on how to figure Awesome? because of you I am know an awesome freak lol. 😂
you'll probably (certainly) find an awesome tutorial on this awesome channel..
I guess there is no such thing as a comprehensive list as to what can or should be installed in a WM... any gui program might be a candidate, right ? There is however a list of applications on the arch wiki i found helpful from time to time : wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications
@@tinygriffy thanks.
A really (more modern) alternative to i3 is sway. It's basically a wayland drop-in replacment. These days many programms already can run natively on wayland (firefox, thunderbird etc...) Native wayland programm-launchers (like dmenu) & nice bars/trays are also available. I actually don't have that much problems with wayland, apart from some games that just won't work. Especially the multi-monitor support in sway is really good. The only sad thing is that nvidia GPUs are big NoNo on wayland ...
I always keep returning to xfce. But the thing I love the most about xfce is also what I hate the most about it. It's ugly, familiar, it's safe and solid, they don't constantly make big changes to it or change directions in their paradigm. I never need to relearn it, regardless of how long I have been away. It always gets the job done. It's built for comfort, not for style. My problem is, I want my cake and to eat it too. My file manager for xfce is xfe( 2 panes are ESSENTIAL). On KDE I run krusader. My text editor of choice for editing config files etc is nano. On windows I use freecommander and notepad++.
Change is something that requires mental effort and time. Currently what is my motivation level?, idle curiosity or zealousness. Idle curiosity is not likely to make you a power user of emac or vo.
Sometimes I prefer a clean TUI. Some tools are better for some people and not for others. But you can't begin to use what you like untill you know what you like and don't like. Try a dozen or more different systems and wm's and dektops. Learn their strengths and weaknesses as applied to you. One man's elixir of life is another man's poison. But you need to try them all, find what works for you and then after you do your "apprenticeship" you will become more productive, that is if productivity is important enough to you, to in invest in overcoming a learning curve. If you don't believe you can learn something new, then you can't, unless you do.
Unfortunately ubuntu tends to break after you install multiple desktops and wm's.
Somehow my Polybar just breaks when I use Lxsession as my polkit, polybar wouldn't run at all when lxsession is active.
I use to be very tight to a system tray... now i don't need it anymore...by the i use arch with compiz as standalone wm :)
Nice guide..👍
You must have watched this at around 16x speed to know it was good that quickly!
@@mjdxp5688 am at 2x watched half looked nice and it it
that's not a video that's is a part of my heart thanks a lot for Awesome work
Hey St! Why don't you use matrix for live streams or even chatting, rather than using proprietary poo like discord or something else
Only problem I found with PCManFM is it doesn't work very well with mounted volumes, it's kinda sluggish...
I know it somewhat defeats the purpose, but I prefer to go the other way around by starting out with something like KDE or XFCE and transforming it with things like automatic window tiling.
I found Qtfm in aur, feels much lighter than pcman.
I just use ranger
is there a way to make it so that your desktop folder will pop up when you launch the window manager, I am a blind user, and use the orca screen reader, but if there’s nothing on the screen for more than a few seconds, orca tends to lock up
Maybe try to add file manager or some other window application to your autostart, so your desktop is not empty.
Imagine that in your everyday use of the computer you have to use two, three, or more languages. Imagine that all these languages have different keyboard layouts. Now imagine what a pain in the ass it would be to use dwm or any other window manager.
I've done a cardinal sin and installed kde application suite because I'm too used to it
im looking for a simple gui tool to control mouse sensitivity with arch. I tried lxinput and xfce4-mouse-settings but for some reason the sliders simply dont change my mouse sens. anyone know why that is?
Sway is what I am going with on Debian 12 minimal with ly for the login.
The only thing that I was looking for in this video is just keyboard layout switcher, but didn’t show up 🙁
You could just alias whatever terminal you use to xterm.
Dont forget to start pulseaudio!
For terminal text editor, there is a cool one that is beginner friendly, it is called micro
Does anyone have stalonetray set up in the way it's hidden and you can bring it up with a keybinding? I don't want to have it visible all the time, but some programs use tray to do certain things.
depends on your WM. in Awesome its pretty simple, not sure for other WMs
Manjaro Openbox has anything you need for working wm.
hm, a DE really is a wide field, but no look and feel apps except for ?
I like to manage mouse pointers and the gtk2/3 robe...
because it's nice to know whats going on.
is a really fast loading gui editor compared to it's functionality.
🚀 FM ftw :D
IMHO is a must have for a proper desktop environment !
? .. comes with GLmatrix and molecule btw or if you wanna go minimal
maybe ?
Nice, though I've been using just i3 (w/ a ton of hotkeys and bash_aliases) for years and never needed anything extra. All of these extra packages and configs might intimidate DE users.
I use Awesomewm and it is very hard to do something. You need to find tutorial or wiki in internet, then find these conf files than edit them. Then you have to chroot to your system beacause it is broke again and fix it! I want add 2 keyboard layouts but it is sooooo hard!
Maybe switching to Kde again
how did he get animations on picom when he opened the eshell
there is a video about it he made last week
th-cam.com/video/DzVgr0mxBfI/w-d-xo.html
thank you
@@hamzabarbara6427 finally I could be useful in this year
I installed Picom, but for some reason I can’t get rid of screen tearing. I also tried --vsync(or something like that), but it didn’t help.
duncanlock.net/blog/2013/06/07/how-to-switch-to-compton-for-beautiful-tear-free-compositing-in-xfce/
I used this config for picom, maybe it helps..
Maybe you want to also take a look here : wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Picom#Flicker
@@tinygriffy I found what was wrong. I didn’t specify backend, so it was using xrender as default. Changing backend to glx fixed the issue.
Is no one gonna talk about DT's 263 updates.
what software make icons on your desktop ?
I think that's a desktop environment thing. haven't heard of any in window managers.
I choose ICEWM and its great.
Why noone mentions that it's also nice to have an archieve manager
what os do u use?
Does anybody know which divided keyboard is that he has behind him?
He has a video about his set up and keyboards, there he goes in and explain his keyboard.
Thanks for that, im try to make function a nc. I not dead to get.