Migrating to a minimalistic desktop

February 5, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo

Since I moved to Linux OS ( 5-6 years ago ) I use KDE as my main DE. This wasn’t a random choice, since I ‘ve tried or at least seen all the others main DEs such as xfce and Gnome. KDE is so much beautiful and convenient that I never bothered searching for something else. This is because my main activity on computers was purely based on multimedia entertainment despite the fact that I had to deal with a heavy load of University projects. Since I finished University , and dedicate most of my free time on Gentoo and other Open Source activities, I started to use more and more utilities designed for such things, such as Qt-creator, version control systems, ssh connections to various servers etc.

It is pretty clear that a eye-candy desktop enviromment couldn’t be as much beneficial as I wanted. Hence I had to search for an alternative. A minimalistic desktop or WM allowing me to take advantage of every single pixel of my 19” monitor and don’t waste them with various widgets and stuff would be ideal.

I tried fluxbox at first but I wasn’t too fond of it because it looked kinda ugly by default and I just couldn’t get along with it. So next thing to try was Openbox. I was quite surprised to see that I could tweak it and tune it up by simply editing 3 files located at ~/.config/openbox

Having created my shiny menu.xml and autostart.sh files, I emerged obconf in order to perform that last tweak on my new enviromment.

I plan to migrate my laptop to openbox as well since it looks and feel quite fast and light . Exactly what I was searching for my “tired” laptop

To conclude with, I added fluxbox-9999 and obconf-9999 packages to gentoo tree since I wanted to try the latest version of those two packages and I guess our users will like that as well.

So, enjoy :)

Refs:

Gentoo Openbox Documentation

Gentoo Openbox wiki

Tags: development, Gentoo, openbox

Comments

9 Responses to “Migrating to a minimalistic desktop”

Felipe LEssa on February 5th, 2010 10:08 pm

You may try xmonad as well if you want to squeeze every pixel.
Henrique Rodrigues on February 5th, 2010 10:23 pm

Hi, what’s the panel you’re using there? I’m mainly interested in the pager and in the notification area (do you have one? I can’t tell from here). Thanks.
Markos on February 5th, 2010 10:35 pm

The panel is the lxpanel ( lxde-base/lxpanel ). In which notification area are you referring to ?
Rajat on February 7th, 2010 11:39 pm

Tint2 works better than lxpanel.
Use MenuMaker to fix the Openbox Menu.
Nathan Zachary on February 8th, 2010 1:22 am

Hey Markos,

I’m glad that you decided to try Openbox; it is my WM of choice. I hope that you found the installation guide useful. Is there anything you would recommend that I add to it?

Thanks,
Nathan Zachary
Markus Peloquin on February 11th, 2010 9:29 am

All Openbox is to me is a Blackbox fork with a restrictive license. I have to wonder why they put ‘open’ in their name. Some kind of joke? On principal, I don’t use anything that relicenses software to be more restrictive.

I use Fluxbox. I am too lazy to try anything else. I once used fvwm-crystal, and xfce might be good. meh.
Mikael Magnusson on February 12th, 2010 4:21 am

@6, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Openbox 3 is completely unrelated to blackbox, codewise. If you don’t like the GPL, I’m not sure what you’re doing with gentoo. I see now on your website that you’re a bsd troll, so never mind.
Mikael Magnusson on February 12th, 2010 4:22 am

btw, if anyone wonders, my user agent lies, I am using gentoo ;).
Markos on February 14th, 2010 5:11 pm

@Rajat

I decided to create the menu list on my own since I found it more convenient :)

@Nathan

Your guide was excellent. It made the transition really easy. :) Great Job

@Markus
I don’t understand what are you talking about. Blackbox and Openbox are completely different projects