Openbox Distros With The Wow Factor - Manjaro and Mabox

hello and welcome to the otb channel have you ever fancied having a go at just trying out a window manager but what puts you off is the configuration that is probably going to require to get it up and running and looking just as you want well don't worry there are a few options out there where you can get a window manager fully configured and a couple of them have a real wow factor let's talk after the intro okay welcome back today we're going to look at open box again before we do that though can i just uh point out if you enjoy my videos i'd really appreciate it if you'd like and subscribe and you all know i've got a patreon account now if you'd like to support the channel you can catch me at patreon.com forward slash old tech bloke enough of that so open box why am i returning well those of you who watch my channel will will have seen my video on open box it was my first play with a window manager on its own that wasn't a full desktop environment and i managed to put the tint two panel on it i got a little menu uh with xdo tools on the tint two panel and i used ob menu generator and i worked with it for a month or two and after working with it i i i mean it's a floating window manager it isn't a tiling window manager and i started to ask myself the question why do i actually need a full desktop environment and i think there was a couple of things that kind of generated that thought i don't really like other people's uh customizations pushed on to me and so even with a desktop environment i would spend quite a lot of time fiddling with the default settings making it look how i wanted and basically uninstalling stuff that i didn't want but rather than doing it that way starting with something big and ending up with what you actually want why not go the other way why not start with something minimal and build it up and that's what i did with open box and at the end of the day i i thought well wow what i've basically done is created my own desktop environment it took a fair bit of doing it was mainly about uh messing about with configuration files but i got it working um really well now i know that there are some of you out there who perhaps have dallied with the idea of trying a window manager you may not want to go the tiling window manager route at this time because you're like a floating window manager uh you're used to that traditional stacking windows paradigm is that the right word i don't know but what really puts you off is having to configure it from scratch and i can understand that because if you install open box you get very little out of the box just to show you exactly what you do get i installed open box on void linux uh the one that i've got installed on my system just so you can see what you get as a vanilla open box let's go to that now okay just to give you an idea of what a vanilla open box looks like i've just booted up my void linux distribution and i've installed open box and this gray screen that you should see before you now is what open box looks like before it's configured there's no wallpaper there's no panels left click does nothing but there is a right click menu although it's a pretty generic menu and it doesn't at this stage reflect what's actually installed on your system you might be able to launch something if you happen to have one of these uh applications installed i know i have xfce installed so it'll open that but nevertheless this is your raw foundation for building your own desktop environment right then so there's not a lot to see there and i can certainly understand why many of you may go oh that looks horrible and i'm not sure i have the skills or the knowledge or the patience to slowly piece something together so it starts to look better luckily you don't have to do that there are a range of distributions out there that use open box rather than a desktop environment and they are pre-configured these give you the chance to get used to the window manager itself and how it works and you may eventually decide that you like open box enough and you've learned enough about it that you're then ready to do your own customizations well i've spent a little bit of time mainly last weekend actually last sunday looking at what's out there and i've come up with two distros that i'm pretty pretty impressed with one is the manjaro community version of open box and the other is a distribution that i've never heard of before called maybox linux which is also based on the manjaro repos so they're both mangiaro distros the fact that the manjaro um is coincidental i wasn't too bothered what the uh the underlying uh package management framework was it didn't matter to me it could have been debbie and it could have been slackware i just wanted to see what the implementations of openbox were like but these two for me stood out so what i'm going to do today is i'm i'm not going to go through the nuts and bolts of each system i'm simply going to highlight the look and feel and some of the functionality and see what you think at the end of the day if you like them you can install them yourself or you know you can either use their dot files as a basis for building your own open box system on the distro of your choice because let's face it you can install open box on anything before we do that let's just quickly go to the web pages of each distribution right so i knew manjaro was a very very popular distro so this was my starting point really and i went to the manjaro web page and i looked under the community spins and i found this one their open box edition and you can see a screenshot of it here they describe it as for power users developers and music production which i actually think is a little bit limiting open boxes for everyone and having looked at this distro i see no reason why it should be for power users only anybody could use this open box is a stacking window manager so it uses floating windows like you generally get in a desktop environment they have menu systems installed they have tools in fact this one actually uses the xfc settings so you don't have to do much messing about with the text-based configuration files and both of the distros i'll look at today are uh calamaris installations so it really is just next next next next and it's up and running so i downloaded this i installed it and i gave it a spin i also looked at maybox linux which came up in a web search somewhere you can find it on mayboxlinux.org i've never heard of this before but reading through the web page i see that it's manjaro based again it's got a slightly different look and feel this version was actually released in march 2020 so it's quite recent just before the lockdown and going through here i see they had another release in 2018 and one in 2017 so there's not been a huge amount of releases but at the end of the day it's using the manjaro libraries so you know you've got the security that you're using a known thing so you can see how it looks it's got the calamaris installer their web page has a nice little user guide that you can go to download installation etc etc and again once you've installed this next next next process and uh it's up and running and it's incredibly functional so maybox and manjaro let's go and have a look at them now starting with manjaro right so in comparison to that vanilla open box session that you've just seen with the gray screen and a a strange right-click menu that didn't really relate to what you have installed what you're seeing now is the manjaro open box community edition i'm not going to show the installation because it's just a standard calamaris install no problem whatsoever and after the install this is what you get you get the standard help screen which is always good to see and you get a very clean looking open box it has conkey over here and and the only thing that i would say about this is the particular con key that is chosen by default was displaying my public ip when i looked it at it earlier so clearly i had to just edit the conchi file to make sure that that doesn't show but uh yeah this is what you get and what you're seeing here at the top is polybar i've not seen polybar used with open box before but actually i think it looks quite nice and you can obviously move workspaces up here it looks like it's got the awesome icon set and we're even using the jg menu so brilliant you've got a nice straightforward left click menu there that gives you well pretty much everything you're going to need i'm just looking at the accessories here we have covanta manager an archive manager your terminal editor which is termite i believe a text editor compton or pycom as it's now called and of course nitrogen that you're going to want for your wallpaper let's just click on nitrogen and see what's already installed so it looks to me like you've got a few options for wallpaper let's just choose another one and see what that looks like or i think we'd need to stretch that um let's do zoom to fill to see if that looks any different yeah okay hmm i'm not convinced if i'm honest let's go for smoke and fire yeah that looks better okay so you can always add wallpaper of course you can so we were looking down here at what it's got um there your accessories you've also got firefox installed by default and something just called web browser let's see what that is it should open up in a second and i can already see that's clearly just another link to firefox okay no problem um multimedia okay just the volume icon uh that you see on the well which one is it actually i'm looking for the volume icon and i don't think i'm necessarily seeing it here on polybar but we'll we'll get to that after let's launch it and see if it comes up hmm okay um not a big issue um you've also got the full libra office suite there and all of your preferences now looking at these preferences it looks to me like this particular version of openbox is using um xfce settings but we'll confirm that in a minute and then you've got clearly system you've got your firewall i'm presuming that might be ufw but let's have a look no it's not it's firewall d uh which is fine i'd personally prefer to use ufw but it's pretty easy to switch these things out and what else have we got h top let's have a look at h top and it's currently showing 326 meg you'd expect it to be lightweight it is only open box at the end of the day and i think i've just realized my mistake before um we do indeed have a volume icon down here um on what i believe is a tint to panel down below so that's network manager clearly that's the package manager okay for mac manager and this ah i've disabled the volume so it's just showing across so we have got the volume icon down here up here we obviously have i presume in that cpu speed although it could be this one that could be memory but we'll check in a second and the time and date being open box you're obviously going to have a right click menu as well and it looks a little bit more populated than the one we've already seen and uh let's have a look so it should repeat a lot of what we've already seen in the jg menu at the top and it does it's just in a slightly different format yeah multimedia networking there's your firefox there's libreoffice i'm not sure what micro is oh micro is that an editor yeah that's an editor of course it is let's have a look settings all your settings here the system g parted h top con key etc etc and a nice link to all the different places on your system so if i wanted to open up the documents uh folder i can click on that and it will open what i believe is yet thuner that's quite nice so and then we have preferences and in our preferences we have links to all the open box configuration files if you configure open box yourself you'll probably be using a text editor to edit the likes of menu.xml and rc.xml and the autostart file but i see here that they actually have some gui tools so let's just try the gui key binding editor and i had a play with this earlier all your key bindings are here so let me find the terminal one which i believe is super t there we are super t and it's termite double click on it if i want to change uh change the accelerator and i just press super t and there we go and of course you can copy any of these and amend them so in terms of shortcuts super t opens the terminal super f opens up a file manager super w opens up firefox and you will find that if you start using a window manager you will soon get used to using key bindings looks like we're using uh ob menu generator here which helps to give us this much more finely detailed menu we can display our key bindings and we've got some links there too the manjaro home page open box guide tint to guide poly bar etc etc okay so quite nice let's have a quick look uh if i do super f and i open up the file manager i want to see what the config files are so just looking very briefly yes we've got a jg menu folder there which is for that um nitrogen is there ob menu generator yes that's what's installed there's our standard open box folder and let's just see what's auto starting so yeah we are actually including xfce settings with open box that doesn't mean xfce is installed we've just installed the xfce settings to just make life a little bit easier we've got a compositor and we have some options here to run thuna or pc mana fm in demon mode so we've got nitrogen restore being started we've got poly bar being started we've got tint 2 being started so it's an interesting mix poly bar at the top and tint 2 at the bottom if i was honest i think i'd probably just run poly bar i don't think i'd bother with tint 2 on this you've got your conkey session you've got your volume icon pull kit okay it's running pull kit and xdg userdares which is the one that creates your home directory folders okay so let's go back let me just make this a little bit smaller strip ah all right i see it's transparent uh our tint two at the moment what else have we got uh we've got per mac pycom polybar right let's see what's on the basic configuration file for polybar so jg menu in the workplace windows switcher which is what we can see there and modules on the right hand side the wired network the wireless network actually i don't see them they're down below on on our tint two bar battery well that's neither here nor there because i'm on a desktop memory and yes this is clearly to do with cpu so the memory i'm presuming i'm writing thinking that's saying i'm using eight percent of my memory at the moment okay you can obviously change these out and edit it to suit there's tint two and if you wanted you could even take the dot files out of something like this and use them to configure your own open box session if you like the look and feel of this in any distro of your choice just using the dot files that's one of the big advantages so um yeah i'm i'm generally quite impressed i think with the menu and this is what people often miss when they move to a window manager with the menu there and with having a nice polybar instance i think this makes this really user friendly as i say i don't think i would use tint to as well what i would say is you have obviously got pamac and manjaro seems to promote this for updating your system on both the open box systems are i'm going to look at today they're fully updated by the way um i attempted to use per mac to do the updates in both situations per mac stalled and failed uh in one situation because it said there was a an unresolved or a conflict that couldn't be resolved and in another case it just seemed to freeze this is one of the reasons why i always would suggest use per mac for the odd installation by all means you know installing the odd package but don't use it for updates use it as an update notifier use it as a method of searching for packages but whenever you're gonna run large updates use the command line so yeah i quite like that i think most people could cope with that and build on the customization that's there so that's manjaro community edition very nice on the whole it did highlight though one of the issues that i've tended to find with all arch systems in relation to pamac for large updates just use pacman on the command line for me it worked it highlighted a few conflicts and it removed a couple of files and replaced them with others that everything worked fine and the update completed with pamac it failed in both instances okay that said let's go and have a look at maybox right so in contrast to manjaro's community version of open box you now see maybox linux in front of you which has a very different look and feel and and this review is about look and feel rather than about the functionality um it's about how they've been configured in different ways and what you'll see here is we haven't got a bottom bar like we had on the manjaro community edition we just have a single bar at the top and i believe this is tint two we do have a menu and i'm going to make a guess here but i think this is also the jg menu and i'm just looking through what we've got here we've got a number of accessories including nitrogen what have we got in terms of wallpaper oh right we've actually got quite a large selection of wallpaper i mean it's a minor thing but it's always nice to have this right from the word go in fact it's got one of my favorites there so let's just apply that i stole this wallpaper for my own system a while ago and i really quite like it uh that's brilliant i like that uh we've got a terminal uh so not quite sure what that is at the moment but uh never mind uh a web browser which is fire firefox a file manager uh let's have a look at the about what is it it's pc man fm so it's a little bit lighter i'm just looking over here at the ram usage and it's currently showing us 281 let's launch a terminal and see if h top uh is actually installed yes it is okay that's showing 312. so so to be honest there's not that much in it between the community edition and this but nevertheless always good to see these are both very very lightweight uh window managers add and remove software i'm presuming that's a link to per mac yes it is and of course with pamac you can select preferences and set how you want it to manage things i believe this has yay installed by default which is always good and yeah manjaro have included the management of snaps if you want uh snaps to be included on the system although with arch based systems it's it's really not a big issue there's that much in the aur although you may prefer using snaps i'm completely up to yourself so uh graphics not much view neo view neo what is view neo i'll have to have a look at that well that doesn't tell me much let's have a look uh internet well we got firefox we've got a second web browser there i'm guessing that is firefox as well but we'll wait till it launches yes it is it's obviously a an open box quirk that it shows up with a generic entry of a web browser as well as firefox and we have a mail reader uh which is um it doesn't actually give me a mail application it just seems to be a link to an application right um office right no libreoffice installed on here by default got genie for programming we've got uh mpv media player volume icon and a few system tools there gparted pc man fm no sign here though of the xfce settings in fact i'm looking down here and it would appear not we have something called a power manager okay they're using the xfce power manager which is fine um and preferred applications so some of these are probably from xfce but tell you what let's let's go into the config file and have a look and see what what is actually being used it's funny when you don't use a window manager and you just just use a desktop environment you don't tend to go into your config directory that much or at least i didn't but when you use a window manager you tend to i just want to see what's starting up in the background here so we have the gnome pole kit we have nitrogen we have tint we have volume icon and uh xfce4 volume pulse we have pc man fm dash d so in demon mode or daemon mode depending on how you uh how you pronounce this pycom and actually not that much else so it's not using the whole of the xfce settings package here but as we go across i see jg menu is making an appearance there as well and so is yay nitrogen terminator maybe it's terminator that's installed so we've got a couple of conkies here i was pleased to see that my public ip wasn't on this conkey on the right uh but we do have a conkey on the left which gives us some nice access to our key bindings so super t gives us a terminal uh super let's have a look super w gives us a web browser okay all good and what about a file manager super f they seem to be fairly generic key bindings what i do like about this is this is tint 2 up here and i quite like the way it's configured with this transparent um well a transparent bar basically and what we have here is links to your different desktops or back to one you have network manager you have a link to per mac manager you have your volume icon and your system icon there and of course here you have your tint to panel themes you could have accessed this on the previous system we looked at as well but hey ho it is what it is i'm only just clicking on this now what you will see on either end of this uh tint two panel up here is little arrows and if you click on them it gives you a sidebar which i really quite like you've got a search box and then you have links to your main directory so you could go to any of these particular directories um so if i said etc i'd like to open a file manager here and there you go your file manager opens at the etc directory um what else so it's a nice very very quick way of going to a particular directory let's just have a look here and if i go back to etc i've also got the option to open terminal open a terminal here and there you go i'm in the etc directory what about on the right hand side you have another uh sidebar there which essentially gives you a a sort of menu uh with updates if you want so system update for mac or system update cli let's just click on that oh very nice so it runs the the pacman command in the background there's nothing to update because i updated it earlier renew keys rank mirrors the may box control center so let's open that and see what it is in fact this was what started up initially and i i unfortunately made the mistake of shutting it down so you've got a nice little welcome screen here which you can access from over here on that right side menu as well keyboard shortcuts okay so that's your standard key bindings i don't think this is for editing this is just so you can quickly see what they are which can be useful and a screenshot tool and all your standard log out suspend reboot hmm i really quite like this so this is this is maybox built on well with the manjaro repos and again it's another great implementation of open box right so that's two different open box desktops both of them look pretty good i think both of them are incredibly usable and i don't think it matters how experienced you are in using linux i think they would suit anybody it's just down to personal preference on the manjaro version i like the way that polybar was used with the awesome icons with the maybox edition i was really impressed with those sidebars but for both editions i i thought the functionality was brilliant it would be wrong to just call them window managers anymore that they're their own desktop environments and if you get used to using these you may well decide to build up your own open box look and feel even using the dot files from either of these two if you prefer because of course these are manjaro but if you use another distro debian or whatever well you can use the dot files and it'll look exactly the same that's the great thing about a window manager you become less dependent on distros and you're more about how it functions and looks for you and once you have your dot files you can transfer it over to any distro that you like so that's about it for today guys um there probably won't be another video this week until next weekend because i'm completely off furlough now and back working full-time and uh they're sending me back down to that london this week so uh i'm working in north london all week but there will be another one on saturday in between times please join me on library and of course as usual i would like to say a big thank you to my patreons uh particularly my newest member robert trimble who's joined on the premium tier thank you mate and everybody else that you see there corbinian schilderman robert boudreau gary moore aristotelis papa giorgio storm picks stephen cross mike long david bird entropy uk richard wade tiger and philip espy thank you much so much guys your support means more than you'll know right guys see you next week

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 9,105

Rating: 4.9170508 out of 5

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, oldtechbloke youtube, old tech bloke youtube, openbox, manjaro linux, mabox linux, manjaro openbox, mabox openbox, window manager, desktop environment vs window manager, manjaro linux review, manjaro linux 2020, old tech bloke, old tech bloke arch, old tech bloke manjaro, openbox customization, openbox rice, otb dutty, openbox manjaro, openbox desktop environment, openbox setup, mabox linux 20.02, mabox linux review, manjaro openbox 20, openbox linux

Id: bG1aELlPE4o

Length: 34min 56sec (2096 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SmegHeadOz]

Two great preconfigured Openbox distros, the blank grey screen would be very disheartening for someone who wants to start playing with Openbox, the list of keyboard shortcuts on the desktops was a nice option.

On a side note, damn, I forgot how ugly the Manjaro menu icon was, that was the first thing that got changed on my system.

I've been working with Windows since the early '90s, so keyboard shortcuts are not part of my workflow, I left keyboard shortcuts when I waved good-bye to Word Perfect for DOS. I blame Word Perfect for my dislike of keyboard shortcuts.

Good News, Bad News about work, great to see you're back working again, bad luck it's in that slightly larger 'Township' of London.