What I need in a desktop environment

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 04, 2025

When this blog started twenty years ago—sorry, I’m still processing that number—many of my early posts concerned setting up my ideal FreeBSD, NetBSD, and/or GNU/Linux desktop environment. I cobbled together what I needed and settled mostly on ROXFiler, urxvt, and Fluxbox, with a few other experiments. It was fun, and I learned more from tweaking my environments and building my own software than four years of undergraduate studies.

But over the years, is a phrase with four words. I ended up going back to Xfce and KDE, just because they include everything I needed without messing with config files and scripts. I suppose its inevitable when you transition from being a student to working full time, and you need a functional system to do work.

The first major departure I made from this came in 2021, when I started using my on-call Japanese Panasonic laptop without a desktop environment at all, and only using tmux. I realised that I was living most of my life in the terminal, so why not go the whole way? A year later and I was still using it that way. I’ve since had to stop using this machine for unrelated reasons, but I did enjoy my time using it like that. When push comes to shove and you just need to fix something with an SSH session, or you want to do some light writing, it’s great not having other distractions.

Read on

Also see (new):

• Adding Home Automation to KDE

  I have a script lower my blinds if I turn on the camera during the afternoon as otherwise there's an annoying glare. My office lights and monitor both have a redder hue at night, but disabling night-mode on my PC automatically disables the main light performing redshift too. I want my screen to turn off not 10 minutes after activity, which is simultaneously both annoyingly too long and too short, but the moment the motion sensor in my room says I've left.

  Home Assistant, the best open source home automation tool out there supports all of this, but it needs some hooks for the PC to tell it about the current state and invoke actions on the PC.