It's said that one day, once the desktop has been perfected, the old bearded unix gods will emerge from the datacenter in the basement and pronounce it to be good.
I find the more I get into customizing a desktop environment, the less I actually accomplish anything. So diminishing returns are very real. And also once I start I don’t really know when to stop because there’s always one more tweak. Getting something like MacOS or an out of the box Linux Distro and doing some basic quality of life changes is more powerful than trying to rice anything beyond some basic aesthetics and binding fundamental shortcuts. Sometimes I enjoy actually just running a very simple out of the box MacOS with very limited customization and I find I actually am forced to focus on the work I actually want to do. I do use open source tools to add window management and ui tweaks but it’s very lightweight. Once I open the Pandora’s box of ricing Linux or rainmetering Windows or anything too granular I get lost in endless hours of playing games *with* my desktop environment. Ultimately I’d rather just play games _on_ my desktop at that point.
@@ghost-user559 we are not talking about being a tool or basing are personality on customizing Linux but the simple fact that customizing has diminishing returns at a certain point.
Love your channel! I've been subscribed for like 2 years now, and this is my favorite channel of this niche. Can't really describe how much I've learned thanks to you! Keep up the good work 🎉
Chris thank you so much for helping us little guys. Your love and passion for this stuff is apparent in your videos and it goes a long way in helping people learn this stuff. Instead of being deprived of information, like those before us, my generation and upcoming generations are drowning in a vast sea of false information. The internet is crowded with echo chambers that produce ideologist and tribes. Instead of being united, we are being divided by the things we are being led to see via bias search engines and news channels. Thank you for being as unbias as possible and creating a healthy community that's full of students and not ideologist. Also, thank you for helping me get microsoft out of my life. I no longer feel the urge to drop kick my laptop lol
I used bspwm for about 2 years now. Just yesterday I switched over to using gnome. I set up some keybinds for some simple actions and rofi. My reasoning was that most of my workflow is now usually just me having apps open in fullscreen on several desktops, and I think gnome is better for that sort of workflow. I am hoping to get back on bspwm, maybe once I get a wider monitor where having windows side by side is actually useful.
Gnome is too much tablet like imo. Seems like it was made for touchscreen devices lol Even though I am the same type of user as you (open a couple of windows in fullscreen), I still like to use WMs more. I like that you always know where and how the new windows open, it is predictable. I have 9 workspaces in my wm, I rarely use more than 5, but sometimes I do and that is very useful to always have that ability. I also usually mentally assign certain tasks to specific workspace, but not as strict as some other people do. So it is very easy to just be able to do almost anything without using your mouse. I guess you can achieve similar stuff in gnome, but my question is *why the hell* though. I don't follow your reasoning. If you were good to go with bspwm, why switch? Especially to gnome which will bring nothing new/useful to the table. You talk like gnome is somehow undoubtedly better for your purposes but for me it seems like a downgrade in productivity for no reason whatsoever. That's like "No, I don't need this Tesla anymore. I am simple user, I am fine with this cheap Honda. I will do a little bit modifications, add a spoiler, change the engine and it should be good to go. I am hoping to get back on Tesla once the government raises the speed limit on public roads"
I use gnome in PopOs. I use 3 monitors and I set a shortcut to move between workspaces. When I open many windows, and create 6 workspaces, it feels just right for me. e.g.: The first workspace will have a file manager, a Chrome window with 9 tabs, and a Chrome window with 4 tabs. Then I just tap the key Ctrl+Super+Arrow Down and that's it. It will create and open The second empty workspace with additional 3 empty monitors. I can fill it with VsCode, another file manager, and an Android emulator. I can move between them with Ctrl+Super+Arrow Up or Ctrl+Super+Arrow Down. Easy. I love my setup, it had been 2 years more. :)
You only truly reach transcendence when there is no longer a gui visible. We come full circle and all there is left is the terminal, albeit with better font's dimensions and colors. This is why the default dwm look is nearly ideal, ctrl+b and perfection has been achieved.
The perfect linux system for me has been Xubuntu for a while now. No matter how much distro hopping I do, I always land back on Xubuntu. For my desktop, I like a setup with almost no active elements. The few active elements I use live in the taskbar and just give numbers (like CPU/RAM utilization, temperature, bitrate, etc.).
3:40 i wanted to try that too, i always thought that would be the best way to structure an operating system, a base stable system then overlay that is not critical which is newer and can break without making system unbootable
I have also came to the same realization, like you I'm also not that good at designing and recently I've gone back to a very minimal XMonad setup with only some minor changes to the default configuration. I started to hate the complexity of my previous XMonad configuration because it required a lot of packages (it started like 10 programs when I logged in) and the config was very large, I also had other programs that needed their own huge configurations. I like the simplicity of a system that is minimal and stays close to the defaults, and I enjoy using it more because there is less mental overhead and a lot less to maintain.
It's difficult to find more the minimum where you're happy with it not looking ugly while not using many resources. I've ended up going XFCE and lightweight choices, but i'd prefer it much lighter, as i generally end up running more server setups and background processes and less using it directly.
Chris!!!!! 0:10 The phrase "Chasing the dragon" 🐲 is definitely not the same as idiom "Chasing the end of a rainbow for a pot of gold". I don't have the heart to speak frank. Help me out guys and gals.
I've been really happy with Manjaro XFCE, however I like what you're doing, I've heard a lot of people happy with PopOS' Cosmic and their variant of gnome. But I really like what the Nix project is doing.
I gave up the perfect system some years back, still I come back here =). There will never be the one (Neo), the world needs change, feeling etc. I admire you still fight hard for something perfect. Ity shows your hunger for something better like a true engineer. Nowadays I am happy when I make really cool tools that first of all, automates as much as possible (Linux, Windows, Mac and other managers/systems. I do miss one of my systems with compiz back in about 2006 I think it was. Yes, I could probably set up a similar system today but I prefer to build new tools. =) Great video btw Chris. =)
Your Hyprland Desktop Showcase convinced me to try it out as well on my laptop, and i can say i wont go back to stock manjaro that soon. Looks really clean and i like the tiling window manager, even though its my first one. Still struggling with the hotkeys tho 😅
For me it's actually NixOS (kinda hard to learn, but once you learn and using flakes it's worth the pain), i3 with some basic yet aesthetic bar and a good terminal workflow.
this was the same with me for about a year and a half. It was the one system that did everything I wanted it to do. Stable base, atomic update system, lightning fast deployment, almost unlimited customisability. It was just a little too clunky and unreliable for a daily driver though. Now I'm on Fedora uBlue, not 100% pleased with this one either, but it's stable at least, Also it's using NIX on top of it. So it's not like I left nix completely.
I've been trying to switch to using GNU guix on one of my laptops, but it's lacking about 95% of the packages I want, and I'm not good enough at writing guile scheme code to make my own packages quite yet (I'm trying though) I'd use nix if it wasn't for the nix-language, I'm too used to lisp at this point, really wish they were cross compatible (being able to install nix packages on guix (with the guix package manager))
The core of my favorite desktop is openbox/plank/polybar/albert. There's a little fluff like variety for a wallpaper switcher because I like the randomness of it. But overall, that's about all I need. With minimal modification, ll leads to a nice looking desktop that is quite minimal.
Nix packages have 2 problems: OpenGL apps don't work without a wrapper and typing in other languages using IMEs doesn't work. It's so frustrating because it could literally be the best package manager that can replace flatpak and snap
same experience.. i've tried to use nix packages in several distros, but my main set of apps always fail to launch with some locale, or opengl issue.. finally i just said eff it..
Function over form. Now I know why I can relate to you and what you do. The thing about the perfect desktop is it's like a model railway, "It is finished but never completed"
Great video Chris ! I think that you would absolutely love learn more about Nix and especially at NixOS and home-manager. It affords you the tools to make your entire desktop configuration (distribution/system + user/ricing) declarative and reproducible. Once you get in that train you can never go back to traditional package management and configuration !
If you're going dwm then dwl is a similarly suckless solution, but for Wayland. It's a bit lighter than hyprland. wm = dwl (with autostart, pertag and ipc patches) bar = dwlb status in bar = aslstatus wallpaper = swaybg lock = swaylock idle = swayidle screenshot = grim + slurp night color = wlsunset overlay bar = wob auth = polkit-gnome
@@kimcosmos dwl has it's own set of patches, there are many of them, but I think not as many as the number of dwm patches. I only use three (autostart, pertag and ipc) and they all work great.
I still prefer Hyprland. I swore of DWM and the suckless "philosophy" this year after 3 years on DWM. Just customization the Hyprland conifg is so much easier then patching/editing then restarting for any little change and having all the git commits and branches... Brr (I know there are other ways of patching then git)
Your hyprland project was a really good base to start on for making my own. It's very different now and I changed many things but for a newbie like me it was helpful
I don't know if I've ever actually experienced a system breaking because of package updates. On the contrary, more often I end up finding some really annoying bug that already exists, and is fixed in a newer version of software which either isn't available in my package manager or hasn't been released yet. (And that's when something like the AUR is super handy)
I can sound a bit boobie but for me the perfect system is kde plasma. It is easy to use, has more than a anought customization and just work. I have one panel on the top with all I want, krunner with a couple of add-ons and shortcuts for the most used apps and actions. There are dynamic colors (based on wallpaper) for qt and GTK apps. Also I set animated wallpaper from the wallpaper engine through the plugin, and it is amazing. I tried to use i3, awesome and sway. They work fine and are fun to configure, but don't fit in my workflow
I found mine..debian 12 with gnome, very simple, everything works..modern UI, and stable..but different people have different taste so..To each his own
My favourite linux desktop paradigm was compiz fusion. I loved spinning the cube with the mouse wheel. I had a windows virtual box vm integrated on one side of the cube
I'm chasing the perfect system too, but mine requires os level programming and building more kernel work off of Linux, as well as multiple layers like Windows.
I like the tiling window manager like dwm. I like the automatic layout of tiling. Right now i am using KDE. What i would like with KDE is the ability to tile windows automatically. Like DWM and its its task tabs and icons, i have everything in KDE. I have One konsole open with 5 tab, one for note taking while watching youtup, another for scripting, another for my music, and another with just an empty terminal which i work on scripts etc. With KDE i can split the terminal into 2 panes, where i can work on scripts even deeper. For konsole i use keybindings to move between panes and tabs. My note tab contains my keyboard short cut per package (vim,micro, kde, mc, dwm, etc) and my aliases. I will open new files in that tab as i need to. My hardware is one laptop i7 16g ram, one ssd for system and home, one hdd for backup, external storage using LVM 10T, one ext 4T for yearly backups of everything. Also key to my workflow and configuration, is a second external monitor. This helps me watch series of youtube tutorials taking notes where needed on the laptop screen. Or watching a film while i script a little (would not suggest this as it prone to errors :) ) So what i would like is the ability of KDE doing full out Tiling Windows. I believe POP!OS has an option for turning on tiling windows. I think this is a great option. With this, id work with KDE on Debian. I have no reason, to date to leave KDE. It provides me everything. Funny thing is that a while ago i said the same thing for xfce. We shall see....... Thanks for your time producing the video and giving us your thoughts. Cheers
Suckless is something every linux tinkerer has to give a go builting a setup on, imo. It gives a fresh perspective on what a system needs and the simplicity of the whole ecosystem makes it really stable and infinetely customizable
You’re a good-bad influence, brother, as I’m starting to stumble down this rabbit hole myself. While my personal aesthetic is different, I love watching the process unfold for you. Like a behind the scenes for Unix porn, so to speak, ha! Keep up the great work!
Well Human Changes Overtime, I think the perfect System it will be like easy fade in fade out animation Also in the next 3 days I won't feel boring, because the problem I have right now which is I get boring on something only for 3 days and I will started to tinkering around the config or adding some new packages to make it look better.
Same principle, just a bit different. The base is using older packages than silverblue and they change with any security updates, but generally will change less than a silverblue install. Since most of the interaction happens in the nix/flatpak package area, the base generally goes untouched, but can be changed if needed giving it a bit more flexibility than a immutable install.
Only just moved from KDE to bspwm+polybar+rofi+dunst, I synchronise the colors to the default polybar colors because I like the black and gold and don't have any fancy scripts running on my polybar (0% CPU utilisation). I made a little script to generate my configs from a central file that I can edit for my other accounts and for my laptop. Bound to keys, I have one script to select a sound output and one to show me a searchable cheat sheet populated live from my sxhkdrc. Took me two or three days to set up but I'm pretty settled on it now, been mostly jumping down the rabbit hole of nvim since, but astro with a couple of community packs seems to fit my needs (surprised how good a latex editor it is actually even with synctex). I may never need to change my setup ever again (until I decide to switch to wayland).
My current desktop is leftwm, love the project, nice community and it fits my needs perfectly. But i want to move to wayland at some point, and i'm looking a Hyprland for now, but i would LOVE to build my own compositor, and i'm starting to have a lot of ideas for this. Also LeftWM Wayland support is coming, and that's equally exciting !
I have enjoyed for some time Nobara a lot, because I found it to be the perfect Linux distro for an older computer enthusiast. It is so functional and easy in every aspect. An other favourite distro of mine is LMDE. I am most of the time, however, using Windows 10 and Mac OS due to them being the most developed operating systems for many purposes. I do not anymore game because when you get older, you'll find out that it is just wasted life-time. On the other hand, I do enjoy the System 47 screen saver, thanks Chris!
I gave Nobara a try but it always had issues for me. Nvidia driver issues, software usage issues and just general not sitting well with Fedora based Linux. I gave Manjaro a look and for me it has been so much nicer and smoother to run with. Drivers work and Software I use - no issues. Only issue is to use Gnome or KDE - gave XFCE a spin but it was cludgy for me and not snappy as a user experience. Horses for courses. 👍
Back in my linux days I had the customization bug as well. Now a days my desktop experience in my mac is basically just cycling between Chrome, the Terminal, a code editor and occasionally finder if I need to do some file stuff via the GUI. Everything else is hidden.
I'd say Mac OS Tiger to Snow Leapord has always been my favorite. Just let me focus on making music not the Computer. Although I might argue using a computer for music isn't 100% ideal. I've recently taken the dive into Android development, although in practice it feels like hacking. I've settled on Fedora running Gnome for now. It's definitely using more system resources than I'd like, but runs decent enough on my core 2 quad. Unfortunately tweaking the Linux desktop is not on my priority list. I'm just happy I can put the dock on the left side where it belongs.
Yes Snow Leopard was the best and I stayed on it for a very long time refusing to upgrade. Every other Mac OS was just what ever. I did really like windows 7 a lot more than 10 and never dived into 11 so can’t speak on it.
for me the perfect system is one where i can fire up casual games directly without any layers,wine,workarounds etc, im by far not gaming that much as ive used to in my younger days, but casually firing up a multiplayer round of call of duty or battlefield,speedrunners etc with my buddies without any hassle and knowing it performs the best natively this way is an essential function for me, next to all the work related stuff obviously.... as much as i love linux and lately especially NIX, having a cleaned up windows host running a ubuntu/linux vm on hyperv beneath where i remote desktop to it or browse its smb share is currently the peak of having a nice system available on my bare metal hardware at home, best of both worlds for me personally
Archlinux, i3, Polybar, picom. Right now I'm prefering i3 to dwm because I haven't nailed down all of my keyboard shortcuts, and it's a lot easier to adjust on the fly than dwm, recompiling is fine it's more the syntax of the i3/config file vs writing in new shortcuts to dwm source, (shortcuts, autostarts, and window assignments) I also LOVE i3's scratchpad. Again, polybar is a bit heavy, but super easy to customize as I'm toying with how I want my layout. Easy to build in icon/buttons for things like mpd or volume adjustments, and I love the header that says which window has focus for when I've got my hands off the mouse.
I would love to see you use NixOS with home-manager, flakes ect. That distro and package system is simply superior to everything else, if you learn it. I would dare to say that NixOS is the safest distro (with up-to-date packages) you can use and it is so easy to test different things. Must be perfect for you, Chris.
My perfect system is windows 7 but compatible with newer hardware and games and drivers. But I'm going to try Zorin OS again this year and see how close I can get it to the windows 7 interface. I want an OS that's stable, snappy, and that I won't have to update every 4-6 years. I like having separate hard drives I can search and folders I can navigate.
@@onatics wrote, _"100% no"_ You're confusing 'objective reality' with 'subjective preference'. You can't tell another person 'no' to their preferences, just as they can't tell you 'no' to yours. We each prefer what we prefer. There's nothing to disagree about. Live and let live. Now, if you had said something like, "I've heard a lot of people who like your idea. It doesn't work for me. I **prefer** x, y, and z, because I do a, b, and c, and they just feel easier for me to understand' ... that would have been you owning, and expressing, your preferences as... wait for it... **preferences.** The world would be a much nicer place for everyone if we all did that.
I'd like you to show how to create your best system but for newbies in mind. I don't mind investing my time setting it up as a newbie, but I want it to be low maintenance.
I have the same goal as you trying to make my pc the perfect gaming and coding environment so I thank you for your guides and tools for helping me get much closer to my goal. I’m trying to use Windows 10 as my main environment but WSL, Hyper-V with debloated W11 & Kubuntu, Dosbox-x, and Windows 95 & 98SE VM’s. Also with WineVDM and other compatibility layers and wrappers. I’m shooting for ultimate compatibility and performance. I’m currently getting my context menu set up so I can right click any file or directory to then run in any of those OS’s or to open with certain compatibility scripts to run with certain compatibility layers and wrappers. I’m more than halfway there with everything I’m doing. I’m mostly done with it being the perfect system I just gotta finish my context menu but the big thing make some scripts to implement into my custom ISO to make all the OS changes, installs, and settings I want as a perfect build to be done all in one swoop. The thing I’m not looking forward to is trying implement all of this into Windows 11, god I hate 11 with a passion. But dx12.2, auto hdr, and all that is a big plus I want and pretty much need. Anyways thanks again Chris
I wish there were more static window managers instead of 99% dynamic ones. I think they're better because they never rearrange windows automatically, if you have them set up how you like it then nothing will change the layout unless you change it yourself. The only problem is that both ratpoison and stumpwm behave weirdly with window focus when you use things like dmenu.
"The perfect OS" will always be the OS that provides just enough for the end user to install and run only what they want. It takes up minimal space (unlike Windows Vista+), it does not have any extra programs just for telemetry or data collection of any kinds (all of them), and easily works with games/programs (not a strong point with any Linux). It really is sad that Windows XP still seems to be the "King" because it is really the closest to all of these. Since then, no operating system creator has even tried to hit these targets. I know the topic of lack of security on older systems always comes into this target, but all that seems to do is give false sense of security.
I personally think that all of this is quite cool. However, for me, I just prefer that well I am at home, I just want to use my computer and when done, turn it off and move on. That said, I have been into computer for 33 years and in IT for 24 of those 33 years.
i like how hes doing all this advanced stuff with a mid teir system as in a R5 5600x & rx 5600 i feel like every one is chasing the hardware dragon instead of the software
Hyperland look amazing and I want to try it, however my current system doesn't really support Wayland, so it's not possible on my mainline production setup because I'm using a legacy NVIDIA GPU(Nvidia NVS 4200M). I might try it on one of my Intel based GPU laptops when I have time.
You can have an excellent OS only if you can build one. Otherwise you must use what's available. Customization means knowledge. The more knowledge you have the better will be your OS. That's the reality.
I'm still cheering for Openbox and tint2 from CrunchBang and now BunsenLabs. It doesn't even look that "old" when modestly themed and it's mostly out of the user's way, strongly encouraging using rofi and keyboard shortcuts to interact with the system and launch applications. #!
was trying to do this, but now I'm stuck on KDE (and I like the breeze theme so no need to change it). But i feels a bit bloated because there is settings all over the place. I like the minimalism in Gnome but it feels a bit to much "apple", it's our way or the highway thinking.. I don't like tiling window manager at all, I just hate anything that mess with my window position and size, alt+tab switch between two overlapping windows is way less annoying then squishing my browser or file manager in some odd shape. Makes me feel uncomfortable just thinking about it 😅 I do like fiddling around with OpenBox, tint2 & rofi though
you're the exact opposite of me then lol. I'm on windows rn but I use komorebi (a tiling window manager). i hate floating window because when I'm working with a lot of windows I ended up pressing alt+tab a couple times cycling through windows. where in tiling windows I just need to swap workspace.
I recently gave Fedora Silverblue a try & I like it so far. I even think, that Silverblue is the way for Linux on laptop - on PC where I need more flexibility maybe not, but probably still it will be a decent experience.
I was a dedicated fedora fan boy until I tried and installed f38. Issues after issues. I've gone back to f37 kde but in saying that I'm literally over short shelf life of a bleeding edge os. I hear f37 eol is just around the corner and thought, enough is enough. Currently using rhel 9 which is basically f34 and rock solid but I found it like debian. Boring. Nobara37 ain't bad but want to try rockylinux kde. Only reason I want kde is Dolphin and using Dolphin as a file picker. All gnome based or anything not kde based I found their file pickers useless meaning that all pics and docs are displayed in list mode and I found it difficult to distinguish what I want to upload.
Aylur also created "Aylur's GTK Shell", which is an alternative to Eww. The best advantage IMHO is that Aylur's uses JS as the language rather than Eww's custom rolled Yuck language.
Funny, I have gone the opposite direction. I am a Debian, LMDE, Linuxmint Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Fedora, ClearLinux fan, - so pretty agnostic in one way. I really find myself heading back to Cinnamon desktop whenever I stray. I have my moments with Gnome & Mate, I even flirt with 'BlackBox' when I want zero clutter. I am a bit like Linus Torvalds in the way that I am pretty keen on just installing without too much tweaking, I just tend to switch to a dark colour scheme. I kinda just treat the distros a bit like you might treat different car brands, you just hop in, drive appreciate the good, tolerate the bad, but adjust the seat and mirrors to suit your liking ;)
I think the perfect system is something very simple to use and manage and also integrate good with everything else, especially with the phone, maybe we can install the same system on the phone or connect it with android and iPhone.
My perfect system for now is Debian stable installed with ZFS on root and Nixpkgs. The WM is my custom Dwm build and the bar is my custom build of dwmblocks with some scripts. However looking into NixOS for the invevitable immutable future that is coming for Linux
My perfect system seems to be a contradiction. I want the “clean-ness” of gnome but the features and extensibility of KDE. It all depends on the task, I’d like a DE that was flexible enough to present radically different approaches at the workspace level, and maybe even have a “verbosity” level for the workspace. The workspace itself would be based on the activity and type of work i’m doing, and the “verbosity” would adjust the feature level, “intensity” might be a better way to describe it. I’d like intensity level 0 to be a super basic hyprland like experience, and max intensity to be closer to what a really well configured Plasma desktop can be. If i kept going i’d also add a “focus” level that would control how much or how little the other workspaces and system overall can interject. At low focus i’d have universal notifications like messaging and cross-workspace audio, but at max intensity it’d be like do not disturb and background workspaces would have their workloads resource priority minimized I’ve considered doing this with multi-seat on different TTYs but there will be issues with shared settings that change based on DE
I already have THE perfect system for me: Windows 10 LTSC, with open shell making the start menu to look like Windows 98, and Star Dock WindowBlinds to make the desktop windows look like MacOS El Captain
If it wasn't for my Linux, my Being would not have engage with my desktop PC. After Windows 7, with 8 through 10, my Being was distancing with my PC. When IT finally decided to migrate to Linux, that's when my PC was breathed with a new life. ;-)
