3 ms·

I'd be interested in reading a writeup on this subject; I've always enjoyed running linux without a DE but the awful text rendering makes it a sub-par experienc

by nvy 3y ago

I'd be interested in reading a writeup on this subject; I've always enjoyed running linux without a DE but the awful text rendering makes it a sub-par experience. I have one of the lcdfans modded thinkpads running Fedora and awesomewm in lieu of gnome shell. But I still have most of gnome involved because something in there somewhere makes things look "nice" and if you just do a barebones install of X/wayland plus your WM of choice, things tend to look awful, and frankly I haven't got time nor energy to figure out what the magic sauce is.

bstar77 3y ago
This is my DE free terminal-centric setup: https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u It took me about 3 weeks to figure everything out. You ideally need to use a distro where you can build from scratch (Arch/NixOS/Void/etc) if you want to truly be minimal. If you are OK using NixOS I can give you my configuration.nix.
kelvinjps 3y ago
I have the same problem
creshal 3y ago
It used to be that you have to fiddle with a lot of fontconfig settings to get decent rendering results, but they've been shipping mostly sane defaults for quite a while now. Hinting for some reason still has to be enabled manually, but very lightweight tools like `lxappearance` make that a single click, if you don't want to touch XML by hand. For the past 15 years, my desktop has been • openbox (also handles keyboard shortcuts etc., can be configured visually with obconf, which can also handle font settings iirc) • picom (for compositing; before, the tools it was forked from) • dunst (for notifications) • arandr (for configuring external displays) • flameshot (for screenshotting) • Random LXDE bits as necessary (lxpanel at the absolute minimum, lxsession when I need to deal with polkit things, lxappearance sometimes) It doesn't do much in terms of system configuration etc., but I didn't find I need much anyway these days. Printers etc. I no longer use, and most system settings can be configured with systemd's localectl/timedatectl once and left alone.
- nvy 3y ago
  >lxappearance My understanding is that lxappearance is for GTK stuff only; is there a similar tool for Qt-based stuff?
  - creshal 3y ago
    I set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qgnomeplatform in my xinitrc and don't care further, seems to work fine.

by nvy 3y ago

bstar77 3y ago

This is my DE free terminal-centric setup: https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u It took me about 3 weeks to figure everything out. You ideally need to use a distro where you can build from scratch (Arch/NixOS/Void/etc) if you want to truly be minimal. If you are OK using NixOS I can give you my configuration.nix.

kelvinjps 3y ago

I have the same problem

creshal 3y ago

It used to be that you have to fiddle with a lot of fontconfig settings to get decent rendering results, but they've been shipping mostly sane defaults for quite a while now. Hinting for some reason still has to be enabled manually, but very lightweight tools like `lxappearance` make that a single click, if you don't want to touch XML by hand. For the past 15 years, my desktop has been • openbox (also handles keyboard shortcuts etc., can be configured visually with obconf, which can also handle font settings iirc) • picom (for compositing; before, the tools it was forked from) • dunst (for notifications) • arandr (for configuring external displays) • flameshot (for screenshotting) • Random LXDE bits as necessary (lxpanel at the absolute minimum, lxsession when I need to deal with polkit things, lxappearance sometimes) It doesn't do much in terms of system configuration etc., but I didn't find I need much anyway these days. Printers etc. I no longer use, and most system settings can be configured with systemd's localectl/timedatectl once and left alone.

nvy 3y ago
>lxappearance My understanding is that lxappearance is for GTK stuff only; is there a similar tool for Qt-based stuff?
- creshal 3y ago
  I set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qgnomeplatform in my xinitrc and don't care further, seems to work fine.