Minimal Linux desktop

My laptop runs Alpine Linux with Openbox as its window manager. The only GUI applications that run are my web browser(firefox) and my password manager(KeepassXC). The rest of the system is controlled and used through the terminal.

   /\ /\        manan@miku
  // \  \       os     Alpine Linux edge
 //   \  \      host   HP ProBook 450 G3
///    \  \     kernel 4.19.78-1-vanilla
//      \  \    uptime 1d 9h 31m
         \      pkgs   484
                memory 317M / 7878M

I don’t use an automatic wallpaper based colorscehme generator like pywal but have it installed to manage my static colorschemes.

The system information tool I use is a simple bash script called pfetch. I don’t use a bar but have a simple shell script to display a popup that shows me information like time and battery.

My text editor is vim using the goyo plugin to hide the user interface and center the file’s contents. I will write more about my vim setup in a separate post. The music player is mpv running inside of my local music library. I do not need a fancy program to provide a library, playlists and metadata.

The big upside to mpv is that my video player, image viewer and music player are all the same program. The configuration is unified between the three and the hotkeys are all the same.

I talk primarily over IRC using the irssi irc client, with most of its interafce hidden. To stay logged into the IRC servers all the time I run irssi on a raspberry pi which stays on 24x7. I can then ssh into the pi to use irc.

Resource usage is extremely low and time on battery is high. So far I have been loving Alpine Linux. After 3 years of using Arch, I wanted to try a distro wihout systemd and dbus and decided to go with Alpine considering it’s incredibly small base install size.

That being said Alpine has it’s negatives too. Some proprietary applications like games for eg, are compiled against glibc but as Alpine uses musl as it’s libc they won’t work on Alpine. Also packages are not updated in a timely manner and the project suffers from a lack of maintainers.

I used to use i3-gaps as my WM before switching to Openbox and to make up for i3’s tiling capabilities I have been using a tiling script called rtile.

Sources:

• dotfiles: https://github.com/mananapr/dotfiles
• rtile: https://github.com/xhsdf/rtile