clearlinux / distribution

Placeholder repository to allow filing of general bugs/issues/etc against the Clear Linux OS for Intel Architecture linux distribution
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Newb here. Want to use X session with bspwm/sxkhd #267

Open dab opened 5 years ago

dab commented 5 years ago

I want to use minimal WM environment which I am in habit. Can't find needed packages in Clear linux bundles.

Describe the solution you'd like I'd like to add desktop-bspwm bundle with:

Also i'd like to understand how can i do it myself and why the process of adding packages is such complicated.

ahkok commented 5 years ago

There's several ways you can add non-clearlinux packages:

I don't see any issues with the packages that you're asking for. We already have dmenu as part of desktop-i3 and as of today we also have a desktop-awesome bundle in progress. If those don't work for you we can consider adding the above packages and making a new bundle for it.

I'm saying "consider" because bspwn is ... well I have never heard of it before, and that usually means it's obscure and rarely used (of course, I could be wrong). We may sometimes decide it's not worth our time (we don't have enlightenment even, at the moment).

dab commented 5 years ago

Thanks for quick reaction. Using /usr/local sounds like a perfect option for now. Regarding the popularity of packages - how would you count it? Used i3 and dwm for years myself, then found bspwm/sxhkd pair and happy about it lately. If you are not in any popular DE then you can found wide range of WMs. But how to rank them? I need to count complete number of installs somehow, which almost impossible to do. Using openbsd and arch linux and both have bspwm in official repos as binary packages. Not forcing any opinion here. Just what i am aware of.

ahkok commented 5 years ago

Ranking isn't really what we're looking at. Up until yesterday, I didn't even know bspwm existed, so we can hardly consider it if we don't even know it exists. I do know enlightenment exists, so I'm far more likely to add that. Once in a while I'll look at usage statistics collected by various sources to see what is up-and-coming, which DE's are on the way out, etc..

fxdave commented 4 years ago

I wanted to give clearlinux a try, but bspwm is the first package I checked out before installing it :(. I3 lacks of features, awesome is slow, bspwm/sxhkd is kinda the optimum. Is there a way to have packages maintained by users like the AUR does?

hnanni commented 4 years ago

@fxdave May you elaborate on the slowness you observe in awesome VM? I would like to check if I can address them

fxdave commented 4 years ago

@hnanni I will try it again and share my experiences.

fxdave commented 4 years ago

@hnanni Okay it's not slow, but the default config feels bloated. There's a bar at the top that I want to get rid of. Also, windows have title bars. By default, everything is floating, which is not why I'd like to use a tiling wm. There is an implementation for the BSP style tiling method - which I think the most useful one - but it is not yet merged. I don't want to install Lua. For this trial, I couldn't get some applications to be tiled, I think it is possible to configure btw, but I haven't checked yet. I don't know, but It feels more likely a desktop environment and not just a window manager.

So to answer, yeah, I was wrong, Awesome is not slow, but I definitely want BSPWM more. It just does one thing: manages the windows and it does that well. Also, I think, BSPWM and SXHKD are easier to configure.

To stay in the topic: Arch has got a user repository called AUR, which is for users who want to ease their life by packing auto installable/updatable packages for themselves. So if BSPWM or even Herbstluftwm is not available by default, the community could add it. This would be more awesome than awesome.

hnanni commented 4 years ago

@fxdave For the let's call it "AUR" topic, clearlinux is open source. You can use clearlinux tools to pack sw for clearlinux some directions here: https://github.com/clearlinux/how-to-clear https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/guides/clear/mixer.html

fxdave commented 4 years ago

@hnanni Thanks, I definitely will try it.

cyruseuros commented 4 years ago

@ahkok I understand your reasoning, but bspwm (in addition to i3, and awesome) is one of the only compositors anywhere close to having a functioning wayland implementation (bspwc) that users can migrate to when the inevitable happens. That should be reason enough to consider it. In addition, a cursory glance over reddit shows it to be right up there with the other two in terms of popularity (more frequent on r/unixporn than awesome is, less so than i3). I realize that the lack of a shiny README and website might make it seem less popular than it is, but that's because bspwm is minimalist through-and-through - anything you need to know about it can be found in the manpage.