Turn Your Window Manager Into A Desktop Environment

a viewer of the channel recently asked me the following hey dt could you please make a video about useful stuff for us new window manager people on linux what do we need to make our laptops and pcs work at their best and this is a question i get all the time from viewers of the channel when these people first decide to go window manager only rather than desktop environment they're confused because they install some of these minimal window managers and they're wondering why they're missing all of this extra stuff things like panels and docks and menu systems and system trays and system tray icons and wallpaper settings and things like that bluetooth you know all the stuff that's built into those desktop environments none of that is built into a window manager why is that is because the window manager is just a window manager that's why i often call them standalone window managers it's just one program the window manager a desktop environment includes a window manager it has to you know it has to have something to manage the windows a desktop environment though is not just a window manager a desktop environment is the window manager plus a whole bunch of other software it's a suite of software you know they pick and choose things to go with their window manager to create the desktop environment so it'll come with its own panel and menu and notification system volume controls and things like that but if you install a minimal window manager you have to create your own desktop environment by installing all of these other pieces of software now this is not a negative i think it's a positive because you can pick and choose exactly the pieces of your desktop environment that you want you can leave out certain parts of a desktop environment if you don't need it for example i often don't use a system tray so typically i don't bother installing them but those of you that like system trays you would install one so today what i wanted to do is briefly i just want to give you some ideas on some of the stuff you probably want to install alongside your window manager to turn it into a proper functioning desktop environment so first of all what window manager did you install because depending on what window manager you installed then the more extra stuff you may have to add on top of it because some window managers actually have a lot of features built into them out of the box things like the awesome window manager for example it has a panel it has a menu system it has a run launcher it has a system tray built into that panel so with awesome you're much further along than say if you installed a really minimal window manager things like open box or xmonet which are really just a window manager they have nothing else with them no panels no nothing let's go over panels because i think this is probably one of the most common questions i get is what panel should i use with which window manager so let's start with some of the tiling window managers i3 i3 has its own panel it's perfectly fine i would just use that if you wanted to use other panels i3 blocks and poly bar both work fantastically with i3 so whichever panel you choose to go with all of them work fine in i3 bs pwm everybody uses poly bar with bs pwm so that's what i would choose herbs luft i think the default panel is design but poly bar also works just fine in herb's loaf and that's what i've used in the past when i've installed herbs lift was poly bar open box i like the tint two panel it's a traditional panel that will show you all the open windows and you can minimize windows to the panel you know a traditional floating uh window manager kind of panel so i like the tint two panel with open box but being a floating window manager if you didn't want a panel maybe you wanted to install a dock like docky that would be fine too for xmonet most x-monad users use x-mobar for the panel now some window managers already have a built-in panel that's ready to go uh dwm awesome and q-tile all have their own panels already built into those and i would just use the built-in panels for those especially with awesome and q-tile the panels are just fantastic has a ton of built-in widgets there's no reason to fight trying to get a third-party panel installed on those window managers so let me switch over to my desktop here and i'm in exmonad today and what i want to do is i want to show you guys the programs i have running alongside the xmonet window manager to turn it into a proper working desktop environment so let me open up my xmonet config and let me zoom in so you guys can see what's going on here and i'm going to page down to the auto start section of my config it's right here auto start and you see my startup hook and then i'm running these commands spawn once which means when xmlnet first launches i want you to run this program one time and what am i running i'm running lx session lx session is a policy kit program so if you guys are unsure what paul kit is check out the paul kit page on the archwiki it is authentication program and you need these kinds of programs running in the background because they are authentication agents and certain programs you actually have to give elevated privileges to run on the system things like gparted for example i know you're going to have to have a session running in the background i think etcher the usb writer also requires that there's a few programs that i often stumble upon that i need lx session or one of the other paul kit programs running in the background now just because i use lx session you know there's actually a million of these policy kit programs available if you are already if you're running a distribution that already had a desktop environment installed chances are you have one of the other policy kit programs already on your system like the xfce paw kit program the monte paul kit program the gnome ball kit program i use lx session because it's the one i've used forever for you know about 12 years now it was the session for the old lxde desktop environment and then i quickly transitioned to being an open box user which openbox was the window manager for the lxde desktop environment so i just used a lot of the old lxde programs early in my window manager experimentation so i've just stuck with lx session but you can choose any one of these and you would be okay getting back into my exmo ad config the next line of my auto start is running the command nitrogen space dash dash restore now what is nitrogen well let me switch desktops and let me launch nitrogen nitrogen is a wallpaper browser wallpaper setter program i've done a video about nitrogen in the past so check out that past video but what this does is it allows me to go in here in my wallpapers folder and choose a wallpaper right now i'm running that you know i hit apply and it basically remembers the wallpaper i set but how does a window manager like i3 or awesome or xmonet remember what wallpaper you set well that's written to a nitrogen config file somewhere whatever the last wallpaper i set and we can restore it by running the following command nitrogen space dash dash restore and that's why when i log into x monad instead of just having a black background it actually restores the last wallpaper i set with nitrogen the next line is picom pycom is the compositor that almost everyone installs if if you're using a standalone window manager what is a compositor well it gives you things like transparency and drop shadowing and it helps with performance as far as screen tearing and things like that now i'm not actually using transparency in this terminal but this menu system here in x-moned does use transparency and you can see that's a nice blurred kind of a transparency effect there and that would not actually be transparent if pycom was not running on the system now the next three lines of the autostart here deal with the system tray so in xmo ned i'm running the xmo bar panel the xmo bar panel by default does not have a system tray this part at the very end is actually not xmobar that is a standalone program called trayer and then once i have trayer launched i'm running the following system tray applets i'm running the network manager applet to get you know network information your standard network manager applet there volume icon is another very common system tray icon that pretty much everybody installs i also have the obs icon sitting in trayer right now because i'm recording in obs other things that often will sit in that sis tray next cloud if i was running next cloud it puts an icon there of the library applet also puts an icon there another thing you guys might want to install is a clipboard manager so a program like clipman is probably what i would go with and then of course you would have a clipboard manager applet and the last three lines here of the autostart are daemons the first one is the emacs daemon the emacs server and the reason i have the emacs server running in the background is because every emacs window that i launched is actually a emacs client window for example here's the e shell within emacs and that loads up really fast if you have the emax daemon already running on your system so that's why i have that i also in the past used the cacoon daemon when i was using the carcoon text editor and i have that commented out now because i no longer have catcoon installed or use it the same thing with urx vt i use alacrity for my terminal but if i used urxvt i would probably have the urx vt daemon running in the background just for faster better performance with that particular terminal emulator so that's my auto start hook for xmo nad now if you wanted to see how i do things in a different window manager maybe let's go to qtile and here is my q tile auto start so somewhere in my qtile config it executes autostart.sh and what is autostart.sh is just this very simple bash script that lists processes that i wanted to run and it's the same processes that you guys basically saw in my exmonet config lx session pycom nitrogen ursvt emacs the volume icon and the network manager applet i didn't have to bother starting trayer in qtile because qtil's panel already has a system tray built into it now for those of you that want to play around with notification systems i actually don't tinker with notifications all that much i typically don't even have lx session or any kind of notifications uh damon or anything running on my system because i don't like to have those things pop up on my screen because i record my desktop all the time but if i was going to use a notification damon i would probably use dunst that seems to be the one most people install there are all kinds of notification demons out there though one of the ones that i would also mention is notify osd i believe that is the one that ubuntu uses you know for the notifications that pop up that have that semi-transparent rounded background they are using the notify osd now for a login manager you don't necessarily have to use a login manager but if you have multiple window managers installed and i have like 15 window managers installed in my system i want to use a login manager the one i always have used is litediem why it doesn't have a ton of dependencies and it looks good and it's pretty easy to configure some other basic like gui programs you probably want to install if you don't already have a file manager installed install one typically on standalone window managers the file manager i go with as far as a graphical file manager is pc man fm it's lightweight fast it's functional has everything you want in a file manager not a lot of dependencies this was the old file manager that was often used in open box and within the lxde desktop environment again because i adopted a lot of what the lxde guys we're using a matter of fact the gtk setter that i use is lx appearance and again this is probably the standard program most people use with standalone window managers to set your gtk themes if you didn't want to use pc man fm as your file manager the only other one i would consider would be thunar which is the xfce file manager a lot of the other file managers the common ones have too many dependencies for example dolphin has a ton of kde dependencies don't install that thing you know nobody would use dolphin outside of using kde plasma so the gnome file manager nautilus i also wouldn't install because it's too tied into gnome so for standalone window managers pc man fm or thunar of course you could always go with uh terminal file managers as well but i probably still have at least one gui file manager installed on the system as far as terminals i would strongly recommend installing xterm i know nobody wants to use x term i don't want to use x term but many of your standalone window managers expect xterm to be on the system many other programs that interface with terminal emulators some of them just default to x term so it's nice to have x term installed even if you don't use it so what i would do i would install x term plus whatever terminal emulator i actually want to use and what i actually use these days is alacrity it's just fantastic it's fast easy to configure you're probably also going to want some kind of run launcher now for a run launcher d menu is probably the one you want you guys know what d menu looks like this is d menu here at the top of the screen where i could start typing something like alacrity and get another alagrity window here of course if you wanted to you could use something like rophe as well there's a little bit of my roofy config either one of those would work fine even if you want to use rofi though i would also have d menu installed on the system kind of like x term a lot of window managers just default to d menu they expect d menu to be installed so even if you're going to use rophe also install d menu it's a very small program anyway it's not like it's going to take up any space on your system one last thing i want to mention is text editors because if you install a minimal linux distribution with one of these standalone window managers and you don't have a text editor installed it makes for a bad day so i would strongly recommend that you have a vim and nano available in the terminal right just make sure that you have vm or nano at least one of those available to you now if you are comfortable in film and nano then that's all you need if you also wanted a gui text editor go to go along with it install your favorite gui text editor such as genie notepad qq g edit whatever it is you want to use just briefly i did want to mention bluetooth as well because the guy that asked the question for me to actually make today's video he was specifically asking about bluetooth go to the archwiki and look up the word bluetooth and the package you want to install is blues with a z b-l-u-e-z so i hope that answers the question that i got that i not just the person that asked the question but i i had dozens of people ask me to make this video today so you know if you want to turn your standalone window manager into a proper desktop environment with all the functionality that many desktop linux users expect to be there you're going to have to go install all these third-party programs the great thing about doing this though is that you weren't just served up this pre-built desktop environment with all these programs you get to pick and choose each of the components and you know you're not just served up kde's dolphin file manager no no no when you build your desktop environment you pick your file manager it's one of the aspects of window manager only that i love and it's the reason i could never go back to desktop environment now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show devon fran gabe corbinian mitchell economy arts 5530 chris chuck david the other david donny dylan gregory lewis paul pickvm scott and willie they are my highest your patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode about turning your window manager into a desktop environment it wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well these are all my supporters over on patreon because the distrotube channel is sponsored by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work look for dt over on patreon alright guys peace

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 50,360

Rating: 4.9651885 out of 5

Keywords: window manager, linux window manager, desktop environments, window manager vs desktop environment, window managers linux, how to, best linux distro, awesome window manager, tiling window manager vs desktop environment, linux window managers, best linux desktop, dwm window manager, window manager arch linux, window manager ubuntu, xmonad, i3, bspwm, dwm, openbox, herbstluftwm, spectrwm, qtile, tiling window manager

Id: FX26s8INUYo

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020