A First Look At ArcoLinux With Dwm

one of my favorite linux distributions is argo linux it's actually what i run on my main production machine i love arco linux love the installer love all the various desktop environments and window managers that they offer and recently arco linux had a new release and with this new release they include another window manager offering now they also have a dwm edition and i love the dwm window manager so i thought today i would take a quick first look at arco linux b with the dwm window manager so let me switch over to the desktop here and i've loaded up a virtual machine here this is arco linux b with dwm and when you boot into it for the first time the live environment is actually the dwm window manager this is the dwm panel here at the top and then you get your welcome screen here that allows you to do things like update the arch linux mirrors run g parted if you want to go ahead and manually set up your partitions or just run the calamaris installer and that's what i'm going to do is i'm going to run the calamaris installer all right and we still have the welcome screen here in front can i just quit out of that yes all right and the calamaris installer in arco linux is quite a bit different than the installer and a lot of other distributions you see all of these categories at the side we're going to go through a bunch more steps in arco linux's installer than many other linux distributions is because you get to pick and choose exactly what programs you want installed and that's one of the best things about arco linux it's why i heavily promote arco linux on the youtube channel is because i just think the way they do this installer is really just ingenious so the first thing i need to do is i need to select my language american english is selected by default that's okay for me so i'll click next the next thing we need to do is pick which kernel we want to use now what i'm going to do is i'm just going to choose the standard linux kernel without any nvidia drivers because i won't need nvidia drivers here in this vm also on my main production machine i actually use a amd card so i actually don't need the nvidia driver so that's what i would do if you wanted to you could pick the lts kernel you could pick the hardened kernel there's a zen kernel so you've got several options here so i'm going to click next here the next thing we need to do is communication software so these are things like discord remino which is a remote desktop riot desktop which has been renamed now it's actually element that's a matrix client now for purposes of this vm i don't need any of this i see teamviewer is also in here zoom is in here whatsapp telegram teams for now i'm just going to bypass all of that i don't need any of that development now this is where you would install things like your ides things like atom and genie plain text editors like leafpad notepad qq which is a notepad plus plus alternative sublime text is also here i don't need any of these particular programs i will install notepad qq just to make sure i have at least one plain text editor installed on the system the next category is the office category the most important thing for most people is going to be libreoffice do you want the libreoffice suite or not and if you do do you want libreoffice fresh which is kind of the unstable branches you know it's got the latest releases or do you want libreoffice steel which is more of a long-term support it's the stable branch kind of branch of libreoffice for me i'm going to skip all of this because i don't need to install any of this in this vm it's just going to take up a lot of space the multimedia category now this is a rather large category but this is where you would install all of your audio video programs so for me if i was doing this on my actual main production machine is what i would do is i'd go in here and click on all the programs i need like the audacity audio editor the dead beef music player which i often use caden live for my video editor i use obs of course to record my videos and stream my videos i also like having vlc installed on the system i like having mpv installed on the system so i would probably install all of those now since this is a vm i'm actually not going to install most of this i'll take off the video editor the audio editor and obs but i will leave vlc mpv and deadbeef to install and probably the coolest thing about the arco linux installer is the internet category because you get to pick and choose web browsers and email clients and for me wanting to stick to free and open source software i'm going to install firefox that's going to be the one i would use if you wanted to choose something else i mean other free open source alternatives you have brave and chromium i see cube browser down here i really like cute browser those of you that really don't care about free and open source software and you don't mind running something proprietary vivaldi is here uh opera is also here i don't see google chrome yeah there's google chrome for those of you that want that for me though i definitely want to go with free and open source firefox for theming i really don't need anything here just to make sure i have some kind of theming going on i will just take on the adapted gtk theme just to make sure i have at least one gtk theme i'll go ahead and do the arc icon theme just to make sure i have at least one icon theme installed on the system for graphics uh we have blender dark table digicam and krita i actually don't need any of that i wouldn't mind installing yep but it's not actually listed here i'm not exactly sure why gimp's not there so let me click next we'll go to the gaming category in this vm i don't need any of this stuff on my main production machine i might install some of the free and open source games like zoonotic here love that particular game really nice free and open source first person shooter but i will skip that for now for terminals i like using alacrity so i will install the alacrity terminal and then click next and then we have our file managers for graphical file manager i usually install pcman fm so i'll go ahead and install that do i need a terminal file manager like midnight commander or ranger probably not i'll just bypass that for now for utilities these are things like bleach bit which will kind of clean up your systems cache and you know clean up any orphan packages and things like that you have terminal process viewers like lance's and g top and things like that for me do i really see anything here that i absolutely need for purposes of this vm i actually don't think i need any of this stuff so i will just skip that and lastly we have an applications category and we have an accessory subcategory and for that i think i probably do want nitrogen to set my wallpaper we have some extra fonts we could install i don't need any of that we have password managers i don't need any of that we have the usb writer etcher so you might want to take that on if you need a program to burn isos images to usb sticks and then of course you have some stuff regarding virtualbox so i'm just gonna click next here and finally arco linux dev this is software for arco linux developers and beta testers i'm going to bypass that for now finally we get to location america chicago i'm in the central time zone in the u.s so chicago will work for me since that is the right time zone for the keyboard english us is correct so i'm going to click next for partitioning i'm going to do the automatic partitioning so i'm just going to let arco linux have the entire 20 gig hard drive of this vm so do we want to swap or not i love that the fact that it asks you that do you want to swap or do you not want to swap i'm going to say swap to file then i'm going to click next now we need to create our username i'm going to call my user dt what is the name of this computer i'm going to do dt dash arco and for a password let me do a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons and then repeat that strong and complicated password and then we need to decide do we want to use that same password for the root account that's fine because it's such a strong and complicated password that can be the password for the root user and my dt user then i click next we get a summary location looks good keyboard looks good the partition scheme looks good i'm going to click install and this portion of the installer is going to take a few minutes depending on how much extra stuff you decided to install you know up front this process could take you know 5-10 minutes it may take 20-30 minutes i i don't know so but i didn't choose a whole lot of stuff so i don't think this will take very long in my case but i will pause the video until this portion of the installation has completed and the installation has completed and within the calamaris installer you need to make sure that this box here is ticked on that says restart now and then when you click done here at the bottom right it will restart the the machine for you in my case a virtual machine those of you doing this on a physical machine what you need to do is after you click done at some point you need to unplug the usb stick that you're installing from that's what i'm going to do right now i have rebooted and let me enter my password and we should log in to arco linux 20.11 with the dwm window manager let me click that off i also no longer want to see this auto start screen so let me quit that as well now let me do a super enter to bring up a terminal all right and then i'm going to run the following command just to get a proper screen resolution here so i'm going to do a x-rander space dash s space and then 1920 by 1080 to get a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution and then if i do super x i believe to kill a window yes now now super x brings up the screen lock or the session manager so let me cancel that super 2 to kill a window all right how about supershift r to restart dwm so it fixes the uh the background although it didn't fix the cocky but i can fix that as well if i do super p which is typically the default key binding in dwm and in exmonet for bringing up d menu and that does bring up d menu let me run a kill all cocky to kill cocky now let me do super shift r to restart dwm and now we just have the one cocky okay this is the way it is it should look out of the box here and i will say you know a nice wallpaper i do like the fact that they have the cocky here even though it's probably not something you're going to use long term you're probably just going to want to get rid of that once you learn the key bindings but first logging in i think it's very important that you know supershift enter opens your file manager ctrl alt v opens the vivaldi web browser although that's not going to work for me is it because i didn't install vivaldi yeah so they do have some stuff here in the cocky that is dependent on whether you actually installed that stuff or not for example super f2 opens up the editor let me try that super f2 it does not open up the editor because whatever editor that's supposed to be i don't think i installed it because the only one i installed was notepad qq so i don't know what that's trying to call but i don't have it so that is one issue there is that some of the stuff in the cocky while that's nice that that's there but it's all it could throw people off you know i understand that i didn't install anything but other people may actually think their machine is broken because some of those key bindings don't work so that may be something that the arco team needs to try to address now that i know some of the basic key bindings in dwm the default layout typically is a master and stack layout so if i open a few terminals here so i'm going to do super enter a few times and there's the first window there is the second window there is the third window and there is a fourth window it keeps opening the new window as the master and everything else gets pushed to the stack over here on the right and it looks like it's a very default kind of dwm config because in dwm's master and stack layout the master is actually like 55 of the screen rather than an exact 50 50. you can see how the master is just slightly bigger than the width of the stack and uh typically i change that you know i might make it an even 50 50 but that's just me but let me see if i can actually find the config file for what they're using here and i believe i actually did a search for this before doing this video because i wanted to make sure i could actually find this is that it is in dot config slash arco dash dwm let me cd into that particular directory let me zoom in if i can here so you guys can see this and now that i am in dot config slash arko dash dwm let me do an ls and there is the source code and let's do a vm config dot def dot h and i just want to take a look at the code here to see how much patching they've done because by default dwm out of the box you really do have to patch it quite a bit to make it sort of usable it doesn't come with like oh it only comes with like two or three layouts installed by default out of the box it also doesn't come with any kind of system information it doesn't come with a systray in the panel it does come with a panel oddly enough being a suckless utility you think it wouldn't come with a panel at all it would make you go install a third-party panel no they actually do have a panel built in but that panel really doesn't have much to it and just looking at some of what they've patched here it looks like they did include some system tray stuff here so i think they did patch it to have this system tray here i've never actually patched dwm myself for system trays because i don't typically use them but that's kind of neat that they added that i think they patched it for some font stuff too because you have two font settings you have this font sitting here which is just fonts i think nodo sans mono size 11 that's just your font here in the dwm panel so that's the dwm font setting but then you have d menu font right below it and i think that's the font for d menu so if i super p to open up d menu so the d menu font can be different than the dwm font they do need to patch d menu though for line height so by default d menu has a fixed line height the line height is dependent on the size of the font that you're using and that can be an issue because you have a d menu that's not the same height as a panel that's behind it so you have this weird just ugly effect where you can partially see the panel behind d menu just patch the menu to allow you to set a line height there's a line height patch that takes all of 30 seconds to patch it and it gives you an extra flag that you can set where you can specify that line height so it you can set it exactly to the point where it perfectly covers up the panel and then we have some coloring information these five colors here that are also down here so this is foreground background border and these colors are set in these here and this is the coloring information in the panel also the border color around the windows depending on the foreground background whether something's selected or not going a little further down we get into some key binding information and it does look like just like the standard default dwm the only layouts we have are the standard master and stack a floating layout and a monocle layout so that's just the standard three layouts that come with dwm out of the box i'm surprised they didn't patch that to include a few extra possibilities because there's a lot of different layouts you can have in dwm even if you're not going to have it enabled necessarily in the config it would be nice if dwm was patched for it and maybe you had those lines commented out where the users could very easily turn off or turn on the layouts that they want to use and i'm going to go into the key bindings here and just most of this looks like the standard key bindings for dwm i see that mod key plus t toggles layout zero which i think is just the standard tiling layout the master and stack layout let me open up a couple of windows here just so we can see this so let me do a ls dash lah just to get something different on each screen and this one i'm gonna cut out the bash rc just to have something different on each screen so if i do super t nothing is happening if i do what was the other key bindings here give me just a second i'm trying to read the key bindings here i want to move this window over to the master so i can actually read everything i would assume super shift j and k a super j and k just the mod key j and k move focus around the stack super shift j and k should move the windows typically it does not you know what i know the problem here let me close these windows the terminal windows so this thing has not been patched at all so one of the very first patches almost everybody patches dwm for is a rotate stack patch that's that's actually the name of the patch rotate stack because by default when you have a bunch of windows open you cannot shift their their position in the stack manually like you can't hit a key combination and make this window here you know in this position up here or over here you know it doesn't come with that functionality so i you know what we've looked at pretty much everything there is to look at here because the standard default dwm config is basically all i've shown you it doesn't have any other layouts there were three layouts by the way which is what i was trying to show you guys if i hit uh super t which didn't work before it's because that's the master and stack layout we were already in it super f is a full screen layout and super is it m it's the monocle layout i believe or maybe it was a different key binding but if i do super t that would get us back to the master and stack layout let me get rid of those windows what i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in here and let me clear the screen got the caps locks on all right and what i'm going to do is because this is pretty much a vanilla dwm config and it's really not patched for all the functionality that you expect most tiling window managers to have i have my own build of dwm in the aur so i'm going to do a yay space dash capital s dwm dash distrotube i'll just tab complete here and it should find that yep dwm distrotube dash get this is my own personal build of dwm that's patched for a bunch of extra layouts it's patched for rotating the stack you know the ability to change the stack and everything like that it comes with a lot of extra functionality that you're probably going to want it looks like one of the requirements for my build is also the tabbed program it's another success program so i will go ahead and install that there's also some fonts that are also requirements for my build so let me go ahead and check out the diff if i wanted to the the package build now that i've checked that out you can actually read my package build here and if i go back up can i scroll back up you can see some of the dependencies for my build include the hack font the joy pixel is fun i also require st d menu and tabbed the menu i know was already installed st might have already been installed as well i have my own personal builds of all those though so do i want to proceed with this installation sure and now i need to give it my root password and hit yes one more time it's installing the fonts and then it should eventually get cloned my dwm build because the source for it is over on my gitlab did the git clone and then it should do a pseudo make install and it's going to throw all of that in the slash opt directory on the system i did see a warning there but it looks like it's going to build correctly though it says there was an error so one of the problems was when you're building my build of dwm is it tries to overwrite the existing binary of dwm also the existing documentation for dwm the license and the readme and all of that stuff is already there so i need to remove these particular files that it's complaining about here what i need to do is as root i need to sudo rm for remove and i'm going to remove user bin dwm space i'm also going to remove the man page for dwm because it's going to be a different man page for my build because it's going to have different options then i'm going to remove the x sessions dwm.desktop file because my build's going to have its own x sessions file and then let's remove those and then i'm going to rerun yay dash capital s dwm distrotube dash get and it should build just fine now so i'll skip reading the package build this time and it built correctly and now all i need to do is i need to log out quit out of dwm and log back in so if i do is it super shift q to quit out of it a supershift queue quits an application to exit its super x on the keyboard and then click log out and let me log back in and it's still the arco dwm this is not my dwm so for some reason i guess the dwm arco binary is still on the system i'm not sure how we can overwrite that if we can let me cd into slash opt because that is where i put dwm dash distrotube so let me cd into dwm distro dash yet do an ls and then from this directory i'm going to do a sudo make clean install and it builds just fine super x to exit out and then let me log back in okay now this is my build of dwm that's weird that i had to actually even after the installation physically go into the slash opt directory and and find the source code for my build and actually do all of this now let me do super enter and that opens the st terminal because my build of dwm actually has st binded as the terminal rather than alacrity because i figure most people that use dwm are probably going to use st rather than something like alacrity or termite let me quickly do an x-rander here one more time to get us a better screen resolution if i can type it correctly miss build got some letters out of order there all right super shift c for my key bindings closes a window and there is no wallpaper set let's run nitrogen and i will set a different wallpaper and that one looks good so let's just go with that and let's do the skilled now super shift c and there's a nice bright wallpaper now the next thing i want to do is d menu this is not my build of d menu that's still what came with arco i have my own build of d menu to match my own build of dwm as well so let me open up the menu i'm gonna launch the alacrity terminal just because the standard st terminal doesn't look good i have my own build of st actually but let me let me see if i can zoom in here this time i'm gonna do yay dash capital s d menu dash distro tube and i'll tab complete dash get all right and then i'll go ahead and do my build of st is also in the aur which is st distrotube dash get let's go ahead and install both of those programs and it's going to say that my build of d menu conflicts with the existing build to d menu it's going to overwrite it that's fine st my build of st is also going to overwrite the default sd which is fine too because by default both the build of d menu and st that are here are just the standard success builds they're not patched in any way and i definitely would rather have my builds rather than these builds this looks like it's running the git clone because both my build of d menu and my build of st also are on my gitlab so it pulls that down from my git lab then i have to give it a root password for it actually to install d minu dash distro 2 dash getter and conflict do i actually want to remove the regular d menu and you have to actually type y here because by default it's no if you just hit enter and then proceed with the installation and st is probably going to complain about the same thing and ask for confirmation in just a second yep so st district 2 dash get and the standard st are in conflict so remove st y for yes hit enter then hit enter one more time all right and now when i do in my case super shift enter is my key binding that is my d menu and you can see how it matches the standard dwm i've got some extra patching going on i've got some extra coloring going on here and i've got the numbers patch where it shows you the number of possible matches for what we're doing and if i ran st you can see that this is a nicer build of st than the one that just comes out of the box so that is what you might consider doing i'm glad arko linux has a dwm edition but the fact that it is very vanilla where my dwm of course you know i'm going to have some extra layouts and you know i can actually rotate the stack here for example if i did an ls here or ls dash lah here and if i did super shift j and k now i can actually move this window through the stack where you can you can't do that by default in dwm it's crazy that that functionality is not built in to the window manager uh i don't know why the success guys are so insistent that something so basic have to be added as a patch because i think that's one of the things that most people want is h-top installed i'm assuming it's probably installed out of the box we should talk about system resource usage uh 225 megs right 225 megs of ram so that's very very lightweight as you would expect for a standalone window manager but if you want a great minimal installation a great minimal installation of an arch-based distribution and you want to start with dwm a vanilla dwm and then maybe patch it yourself i think arco linux with the dwm window manager makes a lot of sense but i'm not sure that's really the crowd they're going after because none of their other additions are so basic none of their other additions do you really have to patch to make them work their build of dwm you have to patch to make it work you're not going to like that very plain vanilla dwm also the fact that their vanilla d menu you know was kind of hideous looking as well it didn't have an adjustable line height the same thing with the st terminal that's nice that's there you might want to patch it you might at least want to patch it enough to where you can set a decent color scheme and maybe the right font size because by default the font size in sd is hideously small and it's just something i think they probably want to address but again this was the very first edition of arco linux with dwm i'm sure they're going to address many issues going forward and i do applaud them on their work they have something like 26 isos or something something crazy over on sourceforge they have so many different desktop and window managers editions it's actually mind-blowing i have no idea how they manage all of that work but somehow they make it happen now before i go i do need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show devon friend gabe corbinian mitchell lakami archbishop530 chris chuck donnie dylan george gregory lewis paul pickvm scott and willie they are the producers of the show they are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this first look at arco linux b with the dwm window manager would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names are seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work consider doing so you'll find distro tube over on patreon alright guys peace you

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 55,344

Rating: 4.929348 out of 5

Keywords: arcolinux, arco linux, arch linux, arcolinuxb, arcolinuxd, arco linux dwm, dwm, window manager, tiling window manager, dwm tiling window manager, dwm configuration, distro review, linux distro, linux, gnu linux, first look, linux ricing, dwm window manager

Id: p3Lawzy7sf0

Length: 29min 3sec (1743 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020