My Ubuntu Setup

• December 24, 2019

This post is a work in progress.

I switched from Windows to Ubuntu as my daily driver a couple months ago. It’s been great fun and a great learning experience. At this point, I’ve customized it so much that I figured I should create a knowledge dump for reference when starting from scratch.

Desktop Environment and Window Manager

I use i3 on top of Xfce. There’s overlap, but they serve different purposes for me:

• Xfce provides the basics out of the box: plug-and-play monitor configuration, changing your speaker volume, etc. Without a desktop environment like Xfce, you’d have to find and integrate packages into i3 to do those things.
• i3 provides a tiling window manager. A tiling WM, I feel, helps you manage windows more efficiently and creatively.
  • Example: i3 lets you create a group of tiled windows and easily move them together. Let’s say you need to do some work in a document that’s supported by work you’re doing in a spreadsheet. You also have a couple of PowerShell Core windows open to run related commands. In i3, you can create a container in which those windows are tiled next to each other. Then you can move that container around—beside other windows, as a tab, etc. It’s great.

1. Install an Ubuntu distro. I chose Xubuntu since I like Xfce.
2. Install feh. (More documentation needed here.)

3. Install i3-gaps-wm.

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kgilmer/speed-ricer sudo apt-get update sudo apt install i3-gaps-wm

4. Install polybar. (More documentation needed here.)

5. Install rofi.

6. Create an i3 config file (if i3-gaps-wm doesn’t create one automatically; I can’t recall).

   1. Grab a good-looking ~/.config/i3/config from somewhere online. (I really need to create a Git repo of my own dotfiles.)
   2. In the config:
      1. Launch polybar.
      2. Bind rofi to a keyboard shortcut. I use Super+Space.

7. Install compton. (I’m not sure if the version specified below is still necessary, but that’s the way I got it working on Ubuntu 18.04.3. I think the PPA above has a different version that was incompatible with my Ubuntu version.)

   sudo apt install compton=0.1~beta2+20150922-1

8. Install a nice GTK theme like Layan Dark: https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1309214/

9. Disable Xfce’s desktop, window manager, and panel. The substeps are based on this guide: https://feeblenerd.blogspot.com/2015/11/pretty-i3-with-xfce.html

   1. Stop the Xfce window manager and desktop processes from auto-starting.
      1. Run Session and Startup.
      2. Go to the Session tab.
      3. For xfwm4, xfce4-panel, and xfdesktop, change Restart Style to Never.
      4. Press Save Session.
   2. Auto-start i3.
      1. Go to the Application Autostart tab.
      2. Press Add.
      3. Set the Name, Description, and Command to i3.
      4. Press OK.
      5. Press Close.
   3. Remove Xfce’s default keyboard shortcuts (whichever ones get in your way).
      1. Run Keyboard.
      2. Select the Application Shortcuts tab.
      3. Remove whatever you don’t want. (You can define keyboard shortcuts in i3’s config file, so it may be better just to put whatever shortcuts you want there.)

Applications

1. Install LibreOffice. (More documentation needed here.)

2. Install taskwarrior:

   sudo apt install taskwarrior

3. Install pass:

   sudo apt install pass