AwesomeWM with ArcoLinux

 

 

I've got to where I am satisfied with my outcome on ArcoLinuxD installing Awesome WM on my old Acer laptop and it looks pretty good with the theming colors I picked out to go with the wall paper.  To me Awesome is one of the easier to work with if you use the ArcoLinux way to do your set up and then tweak things over the way you like it.  I've themed out Dmenu to match the powerline bar at top. 

 

Probably the only thing I don't like about the ArcoLinux way of install is the amount of packages it installs, about 800 more than what I have on my Arch I3 and the memory usage is higher, but it hasn't run like it's bloated.  Now all I have to do is upload my dot files to Github so I can use this again if I need to.  Other than that it's pretty vanilla and runs like Linux .  Enjoy!

ArcoLinux Awesome is an Awesome Window Manager

While ArcoLinux is awesome, I've installed the Awesome WM (window manager) using ArcoLinuxD.  ArcoLinux is based on Arch Linux, the AUR (Arch Users Repository) and ArcoLinux customizations of the Arch Linux.  Since I'm not a programmer, I followed the YouTube Channel of Erik Dubois and his instructions for installing Awesome. 

ArcoLinux has everything for almost everybody if you are looking for an easy alternative to Arch Linux without the command line installation.  If you do the ArcoLinux "D" installer you just go to Erik's YouTube page and search for Awesome, or whatever flavor you want and follow the video instructions.  For me, since I've been watching a lot of Erik.s videos I knew the first Awesome video is # 295, but you need to start at # 294 to get the instructions to install ArchLinuxD using Calamari, which installs the base, or basics of what you need to install any of the flavors that I listed below.  Just looking at the numbers, most people do not install the "D" but install the vanilla ArcoLinux.  I chose the "D" after watching DistoTube's YouTube video of his install of ArcoLinuxD Awesome it look plain and easy enough for me.  DT's distro-hopping this summer and his videos are every educating if you want to learn about Linux, or Gnu-Linux as the purist will call it.  After watching these videos this is what I came up with.

It's getting BAMA football season and I just had to theme it to BAMA colors.

Just so you get an idea of what you can install in ArcoLinux here's a list from the ArcoLinuxD GitHub page.

1. Arco-Plasma (a desktop environment using KDE)
2. Arco-LXQT (a desktop environment of the new LXDE done in QT, pronounce cutie)
3. Arco-Xmonad (a tiling window manager)
4. Arco-XFCE (a desktop environment XFCE is one of the most bullet-proof desktops out there)
5. Arco-Qtile (a tiling window manager)
6. Arco-Openbox (a tiling window manager based on LXDE (maybe now LXQT?))
7. Arco-Mate (a desktop environment based on the old Gnome 2)
8. Arco-i3 (a tiling window manager)
9. Arco-Gnome (a desktop environment based on the newer Gnome 3)
10. Arco-Deepin (a desktop environment done in QT)
11. Arco-Cinnamon (a desktop environment created after Gnome left Gnome 2 to go to Gnome 3)
12. Arco-Budgie (a desktop environment based on Gnome)
13. Arco BSPWM (a tiling window manager)
14. Arco-Awesome (a tiling manager with some use of LUA programming language)
15. Arco-JWM (a tiling manager (Joe's) that is very minimalistic and lightweight with floating windows)
16. Arco-Herbstluftwm (a tiling window manager designed for multiple windows)
17. Arco-Enlightenment (a desktop-environment that is very minimalistic and changes from whichever Linux you download, ie Debian, Arch, RHL, Solaris, etc)

You see two different types of operating systems and they are all based on Arch.  A desktop environment is what most people use.  It has the GUI that anybody using Windows or Apple could switch over and use and feel sort of comfortable with.  The tiling window managers are for using keyboards and not a mouse.  If you have used a laptop as long as I have you might like the idea of a windows manager.  The tiling part and tags, or switching between desktops takes a little getting used to.  You just can't cover-up a window and alt-tab back and forth.  Every time you open a window it will tile side by side.  Awesome is a dynamic tiling manager and handles tiling differently than i3.

Most of these are on here because ArcoLinux is based on Arch Linux and Arch has all these desktop environments and window managers available.  When I look at the ArcoLinux website they do not list many developers, so keeping up with 17 different flavors has got to be hard work, but I'm sure they have a strong community behind them.  Their website is very user-friendly and like I said earlier, Erik has put out lots of videos on most if not all the different environments and lots of reported issues even have videos to help you solve most problems you might encounter.  ArcoLinux will fix issues and some of these videos won't have to be viewed, but if you do have a problem, check out their website and their forum.  

My experience is mostly positive, I do have a problem with Variety, a program that manages your wallpaper and I can't get it to stop changing my wallpaper, after telling it in the autostart.sh and also in the GUI.  Any other problems that I had were self-inflicted so I cannot blame the ArcoLinux team for these.  I will still keep my Mangaro i3 on one of my discs (I don't use Virtual Machine boxes, I change out discs in my laptop and the if I want to use a different distro that I have not erased I just plug my SATA adapter into the disc and then my USB and boot from USB).  Right now I have Awesome in my old Aspire 5750 laptop and I want it to use it day-to-day.  I love Manjaro and I will keep it as a fallback, but with the video support that ArcoLinux has, I want to support them and their time they put into their work.  I can easily update both, Manjaro has Pamac and ArcoLinux has an alias to use in terminal to update Pacman, the AUR, and the ArcoLinux GitHub.

I do want to add that I did get a straight vanilla installation of Arch XFCE and Arch i3 working and enjoying both of them. The i3 I didn't quite finish because I'm not up to the knowledge I need to configure I3 to my liking, and the XFCE wouldn't allow a couple of key programs that I use to work.  That's when I saw Distrotube's video on Awesome and never turned back.

As for Awesome and ArcoLinux, I love the status bar they use, using the LUA language.  The biggest difference between Awesome and i3 is that I don't feel guilty when I use my mouse trackpad.  I've used desktop environments since Windows 95 and just switched to a window manager last month and it's just habit.  I think I've spent more time configuring Awesome than i3 but I blame that on the all the Awesome related videos.  With the exception of the right-clickable desktop and the LUA configuration files, everything else has been close to the same, having to add widevine to Chromium to watch Netflix.  My next little learning project is learning mpd & ncmpcpp music players and visualizations and assigning applications to tags.

If you want to learn more about window managers then check out Distrotube's series on Obscure Window Managers Projects.  This probably has been my longest post I've ever made but the review is well worth it.

Manjaro I3 Update

I think I'm going to like this desktop manager.  The resources used by my computer is minimal and even though I'm still fumbling through it, I'm not in a hurry to rush into all the customizations I want to do.  The next thing I want to tackle is the workspace bar at the bottom, but I'm not sure if I want to install Polybar or something else, but right now I will probably stick with configuring what I have and removing the things I don't want and maybe change the font and font size.  Also, I want a BAMA Football wallpaper but I want to customize that to go with the dark themes I like to use so It's not as bright on my old eyes.

Here's what I have right now.  It's not a thing of beauty but it works for me.

I Finally Got It (I Hope) My latest XFCE Build

Tonight I reloaded XFCE on my larger drive, not that it matters because I doubt if I will get over 50GB loaded on my 250GB SSD.  Over the week I played around with Conky so much I had a lot of Conky, Conky Manager and Lua files on my drive and I didn't want my clone of my Manjaro XFCE with all these extra files that will never be used.  I've done this so many times that I got everything I wanted and ran Clonezilla within a couple of hours.  Now I have a proper backup and now all I have to do is add my Dropbox to my drive.  That's just how easy Manjaro XFCE is.

For years I've always had pictures as wallpapers on my desktop, but now I've just got a graphic, so it wouldn't make my Conky look too busy.  It looks like Manjaro is my main distro of choice, mainly because it's got a rolling release and the other reason is that it's not an Ubuntu-based OS.  Ubuntu is good but every time I did a new release upgrade, I would end up reloading it anyway.  I'm hoping that this won't be the case with a rolling distro.  With Manjaro I even get to pick the kernel I want.  You can do that with Ubuntu but Manjaro's GUI makes changing your kernel very easy, either going forward or rolling it back.  You can even get the experimental kernel if you choose.

One thing I've done on all my XFCE desktops is to configure them the way Linux Quest has in his tutorial on youtube.  He's using Antegros, which is now defunct since April this year but everything still works for about any XFCE, especially any XFCE based on Arch.

Manjaro is great.  Just like Arch, well maybe not quite like Arch, you can get as cutting edge as you want or you can go with a stable version.  Probably next week I will foray into Manjaro's I3 window manager.  I can go the I3 route or load it on top of XFCE, I just have to read up on it. I look at the Reddit r/unixporn too much.

Now if I could just get Conky Weather to work I would be a real happy camper.  Now to finish my Dropbox install and finish my book, Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch.

Manjaro XFCE, Reloaded

When I say Manjaro reloaded, Manjaro hasn't changed their XFCE, with the exception of a few updates.  I mean I've erased my old XFCE and reloaded it with a fresh copy.  I want to get my computer just right so I can clone it for future use.  I might still do some distro-hopping but I think I'll stick with XFCE, and stick with the Arch-based Manjaro.

I really wanted to have Budgie as my main OS, not that I like it better than XFCE but I tinker too much with XFCE.  Budgie is simpler and doesn't have all the options that XFCE has but Budgie seems to use more resources and with my old Acer laptop, I can't afford that.  KDE is still my favorite, but KDE has too many settings that I can play with and I would always be changing them, and that would take too much time away from reading.  I can't have that.

Here's what I have so far;

My biggest change is that I've got a shell running at startup with Conky loading 2 different scripts, and I've changed the colors to the 'chill blue' in the scripts.  I went with a stock Manjaro wallpaper that has a hint of blue in the middle, and I'll probably try to find a theme that has that blue color instead of the Manjaro green.  I might even do the Manjaro Menu button in the blue color.  Either way, I'm going to try to get another Conky script for the weather to add to my shell script.  If I do that then I might have to change the clock to something smaller to keep from having my desktop looking too cluttered.

When I get it the way I want it, then I will clone it with Clonezilla.  Then I'll add Dropbox and download my Dropbox files. Now this time I'm going to finish my book.  Okay, after I change my External IP address back to show what that address really is.  Wish you were here.