Hello Everyone,

as you can see on my screenshot, i am using an intel based mac for years now, which i customized to my needs. However i have reached the limits of this machine in terms of customization options and would like to move to linux to test it out as a daily driver. I’m actually quite happy with mac from the pov that everything just works, however there are certain things that annoy me, but apple does not allow me to change them.

As a newbie in terms of desktop linux (i’ve used ubuntu roughly 12 years ago as a daily driver and am familar with headless linux), i’d like your advice.

Specifically I am looking for:

  • a minimal, fast system
  • keyboard / shortcut based - all interactions can be done from keyboard (within common sense limits)
  • all keys can be custom mapped (i have muscle memory of my custom keys for certain actions, so i’d like to keep them)
  • all can be configured from dotfiles (worse case shell scripts and ansible)
  • very low ressource consumption, snappy system with no delays.

I’d like to try NixOs due to it’s unique configuration ability, however on a headless server it was a buggy pain just weeks ago (for example user passwords just vanished/changed without any external influence, not allowing access anymore), so i’m open to alternatives.

What i am looking for in advice is:

  • a minimal, configurable (file based for git) tiling window manager
  • a top status bar like you see in the screenshot that i can freely configure
  • as much terminal emulator based as possible (i honestly mostly only need a browser and the terminal, most other apps have a TUI that i can use with the keyboard, see the above requirement)
  • terminal based package management as easy as brew (maybe Nix?)
  • custom keyboard layout (I am not a native english speaker, so i mapped all non-english characters to my option keys with the english layout as the base)
  • Option to use 2 keyboards at once (come by default when using Karabiner Elements) as i combined 2 small keyboards to one to a fake split keyboard ;)

My current stack on macos is Hammerspoon for heavy customization, Karabiner Elements, yabai, kitty (and alacritty, for ssh, as kitty is bad with ssh in my personal experience), sketchybar. firefox (customized for privacy)

Any good recommendations or dotfiles? Anything i should look out for as a MacOs User?

Thanks in advance!

  • TheWandererOP
    3•1 year ago

    Thank you everyone for all your suggestions! I’ll quickly try to summarize them for myself. So what you suggest is:

    Operating Systems:

    • NixOs
    • Debian 12
    • ElementaryOS
    • mint
    • PopOs
    • EndevourOS
    • Fedora
    • arch
    • Opensuse
    • Novara

    Tiling Window Manager:

    Recomended to use something based on wayland.

    • hyprland (can be configured from file, good compatibility with nix)
    • sway (proposed with Debian, multiple suggestions, config via file as well, good for custom keybindings, already options for sway in nixos)
    • i3
    • bspwm
    • KDE Plasma
    • dwm / dwl

    Status Bar:

    • swaybar (in case of using sway)
    • waybar (when using wayland)
    • eww
    • ags
    • KDE neon

    Package Managers:

    • flatpack
    • brew (is this already stable enough?)
    • Nix (obvious choice if nix os chosen)
    • snap
    • (pacman if arch)
    • integrated one

    Packages:

    • together with wayland alacritty or kitty
    • foot
    • Yakuake
    • suckless

    At the moment I am trying to avoid anything where RedHat is involved. Not because of the recent controversy, but simply IBM is known to kill their software solutions on a whim. (although i still use ansible), so Fedora is unfortunately out (again, no judging on how great it is). I’ve been quite interested in EndevourOS, so that might be fun to try out. Debian for the desktop probably not right now. I’m running it on servers for stability, but for a desktop environment, i prefer having more recent packages (e.g. neovim). The “sales pitch” for Mint sounded pretty interesting as well. However i’ll give NixOs a try first, simply because it was mentioned very often, same with sway.

    Based on this i’ll try out these combinations first:

    1. NixOs with sway and eww
    2. NixOs with hyprland and waybar
    3. NixOs with dwl and ?

    If this does not satisfy, i’ll look into endevourOS and mint, but that might require some Ansible I assume.

    Thank you very much!

      • TheWandererOP
        2•1 year ago

        It looks very interesting!

        But I don’t see the unique selling point of it compared to alacritty and kitty, besides web-enabled. Is there anything that it does better than these 2?