• Overview
• Research
  • Display Server
  • Display Driver
  • Window Manager
    • Popular Window Managers
    • Compositors
  • Display Manager
  • Terminal Emulator
• Implementation
• Inspirations from other ricings
  • [i3-gaps] Picturesque
• Customization
  • Configuring the terminal
  • Configuring the Status Bar
• Other Resources
• References

Overview

I was inspired to rice my own Arch Linux operating system once I saw the creation of [1]. I highly recommend checking out this theme because its github page has a list of useful desktop environment extensions.

Figure 1 illustrates a broken down view of the components which need to be selected and installed in order to create a fully-fledged Desktop Environment.

Thanks go to [2] for their detailed documentation which inspires this guide.

Research

A list of available software for each component is shown in Figure 1.

Display Server

Is required to run Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). The big players are:

• [3] - The most modern display server in the list, as of today some programs might not work completely with this display server.

  Wayland is a replacement for the X11 window system protocol and architecture with the aim to be easier to develop, extend, and maintain. [3]

• [4] - The oldest display server in the list.

  The X.Org project provides an open source implementation of the X Window System. [4]

Check out [5] about the history of display servers.

Display Driver

The default driver modesetting should work with most graphic cards, but it’s recommended to install a dedicated driver for AMD or NVIDIA products.

Window Manager

A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. [6]

Find a list of hand-picked window managers at [7]

Popular Window Managers

For X

• [8] - A dynamic window manager and the most used one.
• [9] - A tiling window manager that represents windows as the leaves of a full binary tree.

For Wayland

Check out [10] for a list of available Compositors. Here is a selection of the most interesting to me:

• [11] - A scrollable tiling window manager.
• [12] - A tiling window manager completely written from scratch.

Interoperable

• [13] - A highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.

Compositors

Compositors are responsbile for the following features:

• transparent windows
• transitions and animations
• window drop shadows
• V-sync

They are not ideal for gaming as they introduce additional latency.

See [14] for a detailed description of compositors.

Display Manager

A display manager, or login manager, is typically a graphical user interface that is displayed at the end of the boot process in place of the default shell. [15]

A selection of interesting graphical display managers. The full list is available at [15].

• [16] - Fast and lightweight, supports fingerprint login. Supports both X and Wayland display server. Developed by canonical.
• [17] - The recommened display manager for the KDE and Plasma desktop environments.

Terminal Emulator

A terminal emulator allows a user to interact with a shell from within Xorg.

[18]

Therefore, a terminal emulator is absolutely necessary in order to further interact with the shell when the graphical user interface is set up.

Popular terminal emulators for the X Window System are:

• [19]
• [20]

Implementation

By going through Section 2 I ended up with the following components:

Additional software to enhance the experience:

Table 1: Selected components alongside the reason.

1. Set up Arch linux with the archinstall command and select the xorg graphics profile with the corresponding drivers (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, $\ldots$).

2. Install the window and display managers, alonside other packages with

pacman -Syu awesome lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter kitty nano

Install a greeter theme for lightdm with

pacman -Syu lightdm-gtk-greeter

Enable the display manager with

systemctl enable lightdm.service

Test that the greeter and window manager are working with

pacman -Syu xorg-server-xephyr
lightdm --test-mode --debug

Check the console output if anything goes wrong.

1. Install an AUR helper to simplify installation of packages from the [24]. I selected the helper [21], but more are listed at [25].

2. Install the window switcher rofi with

packman -Syu rofi

1. Next up is the customization of the awesome window manager. Copy the default and edit it with

cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome/

Search for the section -- Prompt in the copied rc.lua file and modify the behaviour for opening the launcher:

awful.key({modkey}, "r",
  function()
    awful.spawn.with_shell("rofi -show drun")
  end,
  {description = "run prompt", group = "launcher"}),

Inspirations from other ricings

[i3-gaps] Picturesque

Dotfiles

Customization

Configuring the terminal

Install the following packages:

pacman -Syu neofetch

Then open the kitty terminal configuration. The configuration is inspired by

• github/ParallaxWave’s blood_i3

  # setup font settings
  #font_family     Fira Code Retina Nerd Font Complete
  font_family    JetBrainsMono Nerd Font
  font_size 9
  
  disable_ligatures never
  
  # no bells. Ever.
  enable_audio_bell no
  bell_on_tab no
  
  # catppucin
  ## main colors
  background #1B1923
  foreground #D7DAE0
  selection_background #2D293B
  selection_foreground #F0AFE1
  url_color #A4B9EF
  cursor #B3E1A3
  
  ## tabs
  active_tab_background #1E1E28
  active_tab_foreground #D7DAE0
  inactive_tab_background #1B1923
  inactive_tab_foreground #A4B9EF
  tab_bar_background #15121C
  
  ## normal
  color0 #6E6C7C
  color1 #E28C8C
  color2 #B3E1A3
  color3 #EADDA0
  color4 #A4B9EF
  color5 #C6AAE8
  color6 #F0AFE1
  color7 #D7DAE0
  
  ## bright
  color8 #6E6C7C
  color9 #E28C8C
  color10 #B3E1A3
  color11 #EADDA0
  color12 #A4B9EF
  color13 #C6AAE8
  color14 #F0AFE1
  color15 #D7DAE0
  
  color16 #ECBFBD
  color17 #3E4058
  

  Configuring awesomewm

The default configuration file resides in ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua.

In order to configure autostart programs we need to create a new executable ~/.config/awesome/autorun.sh:

#!/bin/sh
# See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Awesome#Autostart

run() {
  if ! pgrep -f "$1" ;
  then
    "$@"&
  fi
}

run "~/.config/polybar/launch.sh"

Then add the following line to the ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua to run the autorun script whenever the window manager is starts up:

awful.spawn.with_shell("~/.config/awesome/autorun.sh")

Configuring the Status Bar

This guide is inspired by the installation guide provided by [27].

1. For this we use [28], install it with

pacman -Syu polybar

1. Copy the default configuration to the ~/.config/polybar folder

mkdir ~/.config/polybar
cp /etc/polybar/config.ini ~/.config/polybar/

1. Adapt the configuration to suit your needs.

2. Run polybar with a window manager (awesomewm) by creating a executable in ~/.config/polybar/launch.sh:

#!/bin/bash

# Terminate already running bar instances
killall -q polybar
# If all your bars have ipc enabled, you can also use
# polybar-msg cmd quit

# Launch Polybar, using default config location ~/.config/polybar/config.ini
polybar mybar 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/polybar.log & disown

echo "Polybar launched..."

1. Execute the ~/.config/polybar/launch.sh when the window manager’s autorun script is called (see Section 5.2), by adding the following line to the ~/.config/awesome/autorun.sh:

run "$HOME/.config/polybar/launch.sh"

1. Set up a polybar module for awesomewm to show the current open windows. Follow the installation guide from [29].

Other Resources

• GNOME - Touchpad Gesture Improvements for Wayland and X11.
• Utilities for AwesomeWM
• [30]
• [28] - A fast and easy to use tool for creating status bars
  • Curated list of polybar plugins
• Curated list of eye candy

References

[1] supaboss, “nobara-dotfiles,” GitHub. Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/supaboss/nobara-dotfiles

[2] "General recommendations - ArchWiki." Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations

[3] “Wayland.” Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://wayland.freedesktop.org

[4] “X.Org.” Oct. 2020 [Online]. Available: https://www.x.org/wiki

[5] Dimitrios, “Linux Jargon Buster: What is a Display Server in Linux? What is it Used for?” It’s FOSS, Dec. 2021 [Online]. Available: https://itsfoss.com/display-server

[6] Contributors to Wikimedia projects, “Window manager - Wikipedia.” Oct. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Window_manager&oldid=1119230894

[7] “Window Managers.” Jun. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://nuxsh.is-a.dev/blog/window-managers.html#org508be78

[8] “AwesomeWM,” awesome window manager. Sep. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://awesomewm.org

[9] "bspwm," GitHub. Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

[10] “Wayland - ArchWiki.” Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland

[11] "Cardboard / cardboard $\cdot$ GitLab," GitLab. Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://gitlab.com/cardboardwm/cardboard

[12] "i3 - improved tiling wm." Oct. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://i3wm.org

[13] “Openbox.” Nov. 2014 [Online]. Available: http://openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page

[14] A. Sharma, “Compositors in Linux,” DEV Community xn–1uga01807aca52bc, Apr. 2020 [Online]. Available: https://dev.to/l04db4l4nc3r/compositors-in-linux-1hhb

[15] "Display manager - ArchWiki." Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Display_manager

[16] "lightdm," GitHub. Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/canonical/lightdm

[17] sddm, “sddm,” GitHub. Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/sddm/sddm

[18] "Terminal emulators - ArchWiki." Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Category:Terminal_emulators

[19] "kitty." Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty

[20] “XTERM.” Jun. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://invisible-island.net/xterm

[21] vn971, “rua,” GitHub. Dec. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/vn971/rua

[22] davatorium, “rofi,” GitHub. Dec. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

[23] dylanaraps, “neofetch,” GitHub. Dec. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch

[24] “Arch User Repository.” Dec. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://aur.archlinux.org

[25] "AUR helpers - ArchWiki." Dec. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers

[26] CrypticSky, “r/unixporn - [i3-gaps] Picturesque,” reddit. Dec. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/okmx6u/i3gaps_picturesque

[27] “Polybar - ArchWiki.” Nov. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Polybar

[28] “Polybar,” Polybar.github. Oct. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://polybar.github.io

[29] tam-carre, “polywins,” GitHub. Dec. 2022 [Online]. Available: https://github.com/tam-carre/polywins

[30] "The Basics of Ricing Linux." Nov. 2016 [Online]. Available: https://jie-fang.github.io/blog/basics-of-ricing