Linux Desktop Configuration

In my previous post, I covered installation of Linux, Windows, and encryption of the two operating systems. In this post, I'll be building on the Linux installation by describing how I bootstrap my desktop environment. I fully wipe my machine approximately every 2 months. I do this to keep things clean and also ensure I'm not putting myself in a position where I cannot reproduce my desktop environment. It is easy, especially with Arch Linux, to fall into a trap where you've tuned and customized everything so much, the idea of reformatting is frightening. However, as you'll see in this post, with some simple automation, you can ensure [fairly] consistent desktop environments across installs.

Click here to watch the video version of this content.

Setup

My entire configuration is sourced at https://github.com/octetz/linux-desktop. As described in the README, each step is triggered via a make command. There are a few key ones.

install-packages
- Installs all official + AUR packages.
- This includes window managers.
configure
- Does all system and user-level configuration.
- Enables select systemd units, creates configuration files, and symlinks.
install-wm
- Compiles and installs my fork of dwm.
install-terminal
- Compiles and installs st.

The rest of this post details how the automation works and what I install. I'm sharing this process to help others create automation for their own reproducible desktop installs. If those details don't interest you, clone the repo and try the Makefile for yourself.

Packages

To install packages, there are two types to consider.

Official Packages
Arch User Repository (AUR) Packages

For official packages, the script calls a pacman install command as follows.

# requires sudo
pacman -Sy --needed $(<packages-official.txt)

The needed flag will check whether an up-to-date version of the package pre-exists, which makes the command idempotent.

A simple list of all packages is maintained in packages-official.txt.

alsa-utils
ansible
arandr
base
base-devel
bash-completion
blueman
bluez
bluez-utils
chromium
cmake
ctags
dhclient
dmenu
dnsutils
docker
firefox
git
go
i3lock
i3status
imagemagick
intel-ucode
jdk10-openjdk
jq
libvncserver
mutt
nemo
neovim
net-tools
network-manager-applet
networkmanager
networkmanager-openconnect
obs-studio
openconnect
openssh
pavucontrol
picom
pulseaudio-bluetooth
remmina
ripgrep
signal-desktop
terraform
the_silver_searcher
ttf-hack
ttf-inconsolata
volumeicon
xf86-video-intel
xfce4
xorg
xorg-xinit
yarn

The above is my master list, which I've committed to retaining after every re-install. I prefer to maintain this list over time, rather than trying to keep it constantly updated with packages on my machine. The reason is, over time I install many package I end up not using, so after each re-install, I lose (and forget about) any packages not persisted in this list.

If you'd like to query pacman to get your current package list, run the following.

pacman -Q | cut -f 1 -d " "

Installing AUR packages is accomplished with the following.

TEMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d)

while read AUR_PKG
do
  if ! pacman -Q ${AUR_PKG} > /dev/null; then 
    cd $TEMP_DIR
    git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/${AUR_PKG}.git
    cd ${AUR_PKG} && makepkg -si --noconfirm && cd $TEMP_DIR
  fi
done < packages-aur.txt

Similar to official packages, this will verify whether the package pre-exists before attempting to install it. This method does not use an AUR-helper as I'm not a huge fan of them and prefer to manually inspect PKGBUILDs before installing a package.

The packages-aur.txt list is formatted the same as the official list.

cef-minimal
dropbox
gconf
golang-dep
kubectl-bin
obs-linuxbrowser-bin
slack-desktop
spotify
zoom

Due to the official and user repositories being so deep with packages, there are only 2 "packages" I compile and install manually. Those are:

dwm: Window manager
st: Terminal

The reason I don't use pacman or AUR to install these packages is they require changes to source (C code) to make configuration changes. This means every change requires a recompilation and moving of binaries to the system's path. On octetz/linux-desktop, you'll find the source code for my dwm and st. Additionally the Makefile calls Makefiles in the st and dwm directories to update each.

Configuration

Configuration is a bunch of loose ends I tie up, this includes:

Copying dotfiles
Enabling certain systemd units
Creating symlinks

This is primarily accomplished with some ugly, but functional, shell scripts.

Window Manager and Desktop Initialization

For window management, I use xfce (floating) and dwm (tiling). Based on the steps described above, everything is in place to start the desktop. One of the key dotfiles copied over is the .xinitrc, which instructs what processes (including window managers) to start when running startx.

The .xinitrc typically looks as follows.

exec xrdb ~/.Xresources &
xset r rate 150 60 &
exec picom &
eval $(ssh-agent) &
feh --bg-scale ~/photos/wallpapers/current.jpg &
exec startxfce4

In the above, there are 2 essential commands for my desktop.

exec picom
- This is the next generation of the compton compositor.
- Without a compositor, the X window system can have serious limitations when screen sharing. More trivially, you also need a compositor to allow for transparency of windows.
- The configuration for the compositor is stored in ~/.config/picom/picom.conf, which I also keep stored in my GitHub repo.
exec startxfce4
- This starts the window manager.
- Depending on what I'm doing, I'll sometimes switch this to dwm, when I want to run a minimal tiling manager.

Updating

Over time, it's helpful to copy a machine's local dotfiles over and commit them via git for a future install. While you could also setup a process to update the package list, I choose not to do this. The update command copies all local dotfiles into the git repo, and allows the git history determine what has changed and potentially committed.

Summary

With that, you now have a desktop environment! I hope you found this post interesting and checkout the video to see it in action!