18
votes
Favorite Desktop Environment for Arch?
I've been using Solus for years now as my main driver, but I think I may be switching to Arch soon. Or at least, start using Arch on my laptop, and keep Solus on my desktop. The main reason I wanna give Arch a try is because of how minimal it can be. I don't need a lot of applications, and I like to have the least amount of software installed on my machine as I can. Plus, distro-hopping is a disease, and it's time I try something new, haha.
So, I was just curious what DE people are using with Arch. Ideally I want something very minimal, but not too ugly. I liked using Budgie with Solus, so I may very well just use Budgie with my Arch install, but I thought I would see if anyone has any recommendations first! Thanks!
This is a very common misconception of Arch. It's not very great at being minimal. It may feel minimal because you start with only a shell, but that's something you can get from various other distros too. And they have smaller packages as well, as they don't include the headers like they do on Arch packages.
That is not to say Arch is a bad distro overal, it just doesn't really fit the common idea many of the Arch user base seem to be very vocal about.
To be honest, I love this feature. Many times I would be compiling something on Fedora only to find I was missing the -devel package. Splitting headers off is only really useful on distros with few users who compile from source, and I don't think it saves that much data. On my system
/usr/libis 13G and/usr/includeis only 600M. Plus, ascii text like in headers compressed much better than binaries.I like getting my headers with my packages too, I'm on Funtoo for my main distro after all. But we were talking about "minimalism", and Arch isn't all that minimal. If you don't actually care about minimalism but just want a relatively small base to start from, without caring how big it may get afterwards, Arch is viable. If you actually care about having an incredibly small OS in terms of required disksize, you'd be better of with another distro.
Agreed on this - it's the same on Ubuntu.
Is there another distro you would recommend that you would consider minimal in terms of initial packages? The other distros I was interested in don't have a minimal iso, and are rather large in size compared to Arch. I'd rather not set them up and have to remove all the packages I don't need. That's why I was heading to Arch mainly. That and the rolling releases, AUR, and a few other reasons. So I still might stick with Arch because of the other reasons, but I'm still curious if you have a recommendation!
I know having the smallest amount of packages is probably a dumb reason to choose a distro, but I'm mainly curious. I'm testing this all out on a space laptop, and not my daily driver.
Mostly because the number of packages says absolutely nothing about the size of the packages. If I make a single package that contains literally everything I need, I could brag about having only 1 package installed, but in the meantime I'd still be using more disk space than someone who has 100 packages installed.
If you are constrained in terms of filesystem size, you could go for Debian netinstall probably. I've heard good things on Alpine as well, but I've never used it myself. If you're not invested in the Linux ecosystem itself, but more in the UNIX ideals, I can recommend FreeBSD as well. If you have a reasonable infra that you could use to cross-compile and distribute packages, you can get a very lean setup using Funtoo (or it's parent distro, Gentoo). The latter mostly depends on how much effort you're willing to put in getting the most efficient setup you could possibly get, though.
I understand that. Smallest disk space is ultimately what I meant, I just worded it wrong.
And ok, cool. I'll check out some of the things you mentioned, thanks!
I'll have to toss in a vote for good ol' Debian here. It has a ton of packages, and gives rather granular choice on what to install. (eg: You can install openSSH client without the server, which is impossible on both Arch and Gentoo)
Alternatively, look into Void Linux, Slackware, or Gentoo. Just a warning, Gentoo is more of a "build your own OS" kit.
Anyone can set it up, and once you do you'll never go back.
I went back to KDE for my media pc, and onwards to Awesome and XMonad after i3 for my other machines. It's a pretty good WM, but it just didn't cut it for me. Especially after I learned that monitor-independent tags was a thing with HerbstluftWM.
xfce is my standby. A lot of people like the minimalist stuff, but xfce does it for me. It has so many features. It can look as ugly or beautiful as you want, and made to have good performance at any hardware level. It's great. I've tried using Openbox and Fluxbox and i3, and they're good in their own ways, but a pure GUI DE is what I like.
I used to use Openbox and Fluxbox with Slackware (in the early 2000s) and when I found Arch, XFCE was godly. Speedy, performant, minimalist and gets the job done on older hardware.
Yup, BSPWM+SXHKD works great for me. I much prefer the config style of it vs i3
Since I'm the de facto Sway evangelist on ~, it's worth noting that Sway has gaps built right in and its trivially easy to configure.
I can appreciate that. Sway is by no means perfect. It works decently in daily usage, but not all applications are well suited to it. I really don't use many different GUI applications from day to day, though - my terminal emulator, web browser, and PDF viewer all work great and that covers 99% of what I use my computer for.
For the most minimalist, you won't use a whole DE; instead, you'll use just a single component, the window manager (WM). i3 and Openbox are the two I'd most recommend; they're both very lightweight and speedy. Openbox is a more traditional one, but it's very customizable and fits well with almost any other tools you want to pair with it. i3 is what's known as a tiling window manager, which means that rather then having windows that are draggable and overlap, it never lets windows overlap and arranges them for you. This has the advantage of allowing you to use it entirely with the keyboard and doesn't need fancy borders, which is great on a small screen especially, but does have a learning curve and it's not as intuitive for some programs. I'd recommend giving i3 a shot, and if you don't like it then Openbox is a good fallback. Good luck! :)
Sway - an i3-compatible compositor and desktop environment for Wayland. It's still got some rough edges but it's well designed and Wayland is the future of graphics on Linux so I think it's the best choice.
I actually think I'm going to give Sway a shot. I'm assuming I need to install Wayland instead of Xorg on my fresh Arch install? If so, why is the package called weston? Is this what I should be installing? Not sure if you have any idea what I'm asking, but I thought I would just ask for the hell of it.
Addendum to the previous comment:
It looks like all the Wayland dependancies are also listed under the Sway package so you should be OK to just go ahead and install that instead of bothering with Weston.
It's also worth installing rofi and a status program like i3status-rs (my preferred choice, others exist). These turn Sway into a fully fledged desktop environment.
Ah, you're right. I didn't drill down far enough to look at its dependencies. Thanks for checking! And thanks for the recommendations as well! I'll be giving it all a try soon.
No problem, if you have any problems with your config feel free to ask, I'm by no means an expert but I've been using Sway for a while now so I know my way around it to a reasonable extent.
I got everything up and running last night! Your suggestions for rofi and i3status helped a lot. Just curious though, is there a specific display/login manager you use? It seems sway doesn't support any, but may work with some like SDDM and GDM? I currently have it auto-run sway when I login via the tty, but I'd like to use a simple display manager if I could, so I'm curious if you use/recommend any.
Works perfectly with SDDM in my experience, doesn't even need any weird configuration - it's all autodetected.
Sounds good to me! Thanks!
Weston is an implementation of a Wayland compositor. Basically it's doing the same job as Sway (though not as well). All of the Wayland stuff is listed as a dependancy to the Weston package and I assume that's why Arch recommends installing Weston to (by extension) install Wayland. It's a bit strange but it works and it doesn't really do any harm because Weston itself isn't a massive piece of software as far as I know.
To echo the other commenters here, I love using i3wm and i3-gaps on Arch. Make it super easy to have a nice looking, minimalistic desktop setup that can be entirely controlled using keyboard shortcuts.
If you do go with i3 or Openbox and want to make things look pretty, I highly recommend checking out r/unixporn on reddit for inspiration and suggestions of useful utilities for prettifying your desktop.
I wish I could view a version of that subreddit but curated to omit the posts by people who slap polybar onto i3-gaps, choose some nice colours and a material-design wallpaper and call it a day.
You're not wrong, easily a quarter of the posts that come up are more or less that setup. I always just wait for the really interesting posts where someone threw together a script or found some new utility that does something cool.
I LOVE Netrunner: https://www.netrunner.com/netrunner-rolling-release/
edit: note it is a more complete linux suite so maybe not the best choice for a minimal arch distro.
This looks interesting, Rolling release feels so much easier for a desktop env. too!
I'm currently using KDE Plasma and I'm fairly happy with it, but obviously that's not something minimal.
I've used evilwm before and quite liked it. Though that window manager has really gone downhill since the developer added a configuration file; it's really not quite as minimalistic as it was in the 1.0 days :P
I loved i3 and still use it quite often for development.
For my daily usage, or for music production or anything not coding basically I use Gnome with Wayland.
I'm a big fan of Gnome. Granted, it's not "minimal", but what I like about it is that it just works, and is a very productive environment when you know how to use it.
I've had this setup on my desktop machine for 5+ years, no reinstalls, everything is rock solid. I love Arch :)
I'll break the mold and say that I loved using Enlightenment as a lightweight DE on my Arch install. It's a bit of a pain to get working fully, and requires some dipping into the AUR and modifying PKGBUILDS to get it all installed, but it's certainly light and minimalistic. Plus it's something you don't see often, the unique factor is nice too.
I would recommend any tiling WM. they are all fairly similar but have their own quirks.
After using GNOME on Arch for years, I finally switched when my extensions started randomly crashing the whole desktop after a GNOME update.
I've tried out KDE, Deepin and finally settled on Budgie. I really like how clean and fast it feels and while it's not feature complete, I don't really miss anything other than window grouping of similar apps.
In the past I've also tried i3 and, while it took a while to get into, it was really great for development. Perhaps I should try that one out again.
As you are coming from Solus, I'd just start with installing budgie-desktop and use that as a base for trying out other DE's, such as i3 or similar.
I'm using Manjaro, prior to that I had only briefly used Xubuntu so it felt like a giant leap into the unknown! Considering I managed to get it to run stable on an ancient Toshiba NB255 netbook I feel like it is quite lightweight.