Yeah, it’s super cool. You do have to be running a more minimal environment though, because some (lots) DEs require the DM to set things up.
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For sure. Neon uses SDDM and I think Solus used LightDM, but what I assumed was that a WM like i3 or dwm required gnome, kde, xfce, etc to be running. Or really do they just require X11?
And I guess this is primarily in the context of starting the computer from nothing, what do you see? What is the process of logging in from there?
To expound on this, let’s start with some definitions:
Desktop Environment. Features. Things like brightness control, volume control, the taskbar, etc…
Window Manager. The thing that controls how the windows are displayed in the desktop.
So, i3 is a window manager. Gnome is a Window Manager that has a Desktop Environment on top of it. technically mutter is Gnome’s Window Manager though.
The Window Manager scaffolds for the Desktop Environment, kinda… The Desktop Environment provides the features that make it “feel” comfy, the Window Manager does the heavy lifting.
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Just X11.
You’d be surprised how lightweight of a system you can build with i3 or dwm and suckless.
>400 packages.
I’m at 1100 but I’m also set up for tons of development on ruby, python, node, go, c++ and perl, so I’ve got a bunch of python-stupidlib packages.
What do you see? press ctrl+alt+F4 on your Linux box. That’s what you’ll see. Black screen with the text: Manjaro 5.6.7 (kernel version) and $HOSTNAME login:
What’s the process for logging in?
username \n password \n
retry until success.
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This is definitely appealing to me…
But for me, what’s the persistent config for me to start my system and have a clear path to log into my admin system and do work
Most of my work is vnc screen sharing, ssh, http or file sharing protocols.
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I’m not sure what you’re asking.
That was worded badly and I apologize. I want my system to start in a predictable way based on what was opened when I closed the session (as opposed to my current KDE system which opens some windows but not all from my previous session).
Hmmm, that’d need some scripting.
You can get the environment tree structure from i3-msg. It’s just json, so on your shutdown/logout script, you could have a save-workspace method, that dumps the workspace tree into a file. Then on startup, you could either have it auto-load or a keystroke to restore the layout.
It’d be one command to have it restore the tree (window frame layout), but the more complicated bit would be walking the tree and relaunch all the applications.
It would not be an insurmountable task though.
I could see this being accomplished in a 2 hour bash scripting session.
All good. I sorta got that from your previous statement, but I wanted to be sure that was what you wanted.
most vnc clients accept <command> <ip/hostname> so that won’t be difficult to fully reconnect with.
Firefox ‘restore previous session’
there’s a fuse binding for 90% of file sharing protocols so you can probably just add it to a startup script to connect to those services.
simple to script reconnections here.
IDK if you wanna move this to your tech blog thread, but this could be very helpful info for others. 
Quick example of me logging into my laptop, while it’s docked:
Mods eyes only
@oO.o since sarge is getting you warmed up to window managers, here’s basic comparison table for different WM’s. Note that development on some of listed WM’s is stopped, but still that should give you some insight.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_tiling_window_managers
Based on my personal testing here’s my take for different WM’s
i3
Quite easy to set up at get going, configured with regular .config file. Really popular so finding tutorials and help should be easy. NOTE that there’s the vanilla i3 and forked i3-gaps.
dwm
Minimal, relay minimal. Configured by editing the source code. I’ve never used dwm myself but many say it’s not that complicated, just needs few evenings of research and some trial and errors. Great if you are fine maintaining it, i.e. having your own build.
awesome
Configured using Lua, and from my perspective you can go much further with customization than with i3. Awesome is quite popular and available in most distribution repos. Handles floating windows quite well and I find that controlling window layouts was easier with awesome than with i3.
other popular WM’s are Xmonad and bspwm, but I have’t got time to dig into those.
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almost everyone who uses i3 uses the i3-gaps fork because it provides a lot of additional features, rather than just “hey we added gaps”
gnif will find this statement silly
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Aye, just wanted to point this out since it confused me at the beginning. And also this kind of pushed me into using Awesome, since it had the stuff i3-gaps had, but at the same time awesome was available in the repositories, while usually if distro had i3 supported, it was the vanilla non-gap version.
I know there’s usually third party repos available and I can just compile the source code myself, but imo WM should be something that updates when the system updates. And I don’t trust myself enough to maintain software that I’ve compiled straight from source. 
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I’ve been meaning to give awesome a try but I’m happy with i3 and I am trying to spend less time pointlessly configuring things on a computer.
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When I ran arch I did so with the mate DE.
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Manjaro with XFCE is the true Chad Linux.
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Enlightened ones run Ubuntu + Awesome
or what ever it is that I’m running at the time
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*Ubuntu LTS Gnome
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That shit works.
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You learn awesomewm my friend and emerge 12 years later a mac user
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