Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.
Linus Torvalds
In a world where existing software design pract...
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That was an interesting read, thank you. I run Regolith OS, which is Ubuntu packaged with i3, and is a really nice way to get a working set-up of i3 without wading through configuration after configuration file.
Regolith is the most productive OS (variant) I've used in like 13+ years of using Linux on the desktop. I HIGHLY recommend it for anyone wanting to try a tiling WM.
That's great. I hadn't heard of it before. thanks ✌️
All these are pretty Ubuntu specific. For example, Fedora puts the display manager on the first terminal (instead of the 7th). Also, the TTYs are not started unless you switch to a specific terminal, so
getty tty2is only spawned when you pressAlt-F2(orCtrl-Alt-F2if you are currently in a graphical environment).Also, Fedora runs GNOME on Wayland by default, and as far as i know Ubuntu is planning a slow transition, too[citation needed](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_(ho...]. Wayland is a completely different beast of which you could write a whole article. GNOME and KDE are actively developed to use Wayland, and there is also an i3 (a popular tiling window manager) replacement for Wayland called Sway.
Thanks for the info Gergely. I read up a bit about Wayland after your comment and it amazed me. I tried sway and was (quite amusingly) greeted by the following message:
Ubuntu LTS more inclined towards stability. This is the reason why 18.04 did not come with Wayland by default. It does give you an option to switch though. I'll be interested to see if the next LTS comes wayland default
Yeah, NVIDIA is notoriously not supporting Linux for some reason. Yes, there is a Linux driver, but it’s far behind the Windows driver in terms of features, plus it doesn’t support a lot of newer interfaces related to Linux. Nuoveau is a good alternative (and is present in Ubuntu 18.04), but still with a lot of missing features.
About Wayland; i guess Ubuntu doesn’t support it by default because their mouth is still a bit sour that MIR (a very similar protocol, developed by Canonical) “lost” against Wayland. Let’s see if they can get pass that, as Wayland is a good way to proceed (although it has its own shortcomings). Also note that 18.04 is exactly two years old now. Wayland grew a lot in the past 2 years, so it may become default (or at least well supported) in the upcoming LTS.
The most popular DE is GNOME which by default uses Wayland, not X11. Wayland architecture is quite different so you should probably at least mention that. Perhaps add a separate section or even full post about it?
In fact, this article is already so old-fashioned...
Yeah. I wanted to get the fundamentals right before going into modern systems. I guess its how I learn :)
In the LTS release of ubuntu GNOME, there was an option to use both X11 as well as Wayland. But for ubuntu 18.04 at least, it was shipped with X11 by default.
Nice article!
I wrote not long ago an article for beginners to try i3. I try to explain everything, and I show how to build a basic configuration step by step.
Hope it can help!
thevaluable.dev/window-manager-mou...
Thanks Matthieu. The next article I was about to write was on i3 only :)
Your website looks awesome. Are you using a static site generator?
Thanks! I'm using Hugo, with this theme I modified: github.com/vjeantet/hugo-theme-casper
Excellent article! Very insightful. I knew most of this, but it confirmed and cemented a few things that were a bit shaky for me. Thanks!
Would you consider doing a full series of deep dives on Linux?
Thanks Jason. Right now I am doing a series on Window Manager Hopping. But I would love to do such a series!
For those folks who tried installing lightgdm and didn't work, you might see a message "/dev/nvme3/: clean" and you waited for a long time.
Try these commands. (Alt + F2 to login, if you are still stuck).
sudo service gdm3 status (in you case it might be gdm)
If its not already running try:
sudo service gdm3 start
Great post, Angad! I shared it in our Telegram newsletter/channel for devs. 👉🏼 Link
Thanks Utkarsh. I'm glad there is a telegram group for Dev 😄
It's kind of an unofficial thing, not endorsed by the DEV team. 😅 But we love to share the best dev resources, articles, videos, etc. there anyway. Hope to see you there. Cheers!
Which display manager are you using in the screenshot that says Erik? That looks pretty cool
It is a lightdm configuration. I found it online. See this video for reference 😄 : youtu.be/_dYqisDIcC0
Awesome thank you!
"A window manager also provides client side decorations, such as title-bars, buttons etc"
Window decoration drawn by the window manager is called server side decoration.
X11 has a flipped view of client and server: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_...
This post is amazingly useful and dead simple to understand.
Thank you so much!
I'm glad I could help :)
Love this technical Explanations!
I switched from cinnamon to i3wm and the experience is wonderful. Thanks for this article, it clarifies several things I wasn't sure how they work.
I'm glad this article helped :)
Great Post!
When I used Linux Desktop, I didn't use any display managers. Instead I login to TTY console and run
startxmanually ;)I've been using UNIX/X since the mid-90's, and still found your post enlightening...nice review of parts often forgotten behind the scenes. Keep 'em coming!
Thanks a lot Mike, appreciate it.
Cool post along with plenty of details (y). Any tools recommendation for record/replaying X11 events like 'cnee' but more human readable scripts?
Hmmmm I was hoping I could find any binding for higher level programming languages, but there are none! both PYPI and npm ran dry. This never happens often
No wonder it runs 90% of the world :)