Reinstalling Arch Linux Part II - Getting a GUI

Alright, so as I said in my last post, Arch Linux is that oddball that does not come with a graphical user interface upon installation - heck, it does not even have support for Wi-Fi out of the box (you need to install some wireless support package for it). The Live ISO has everything for you to do the installation as painless as possible, but it doesn't care about a thing after you have done it - catch that?

Sometimes I question myself - do I really need a GUI? I mean - it's Linux. I can do most of the stuff I need with just a console - from doing Google searches to writing code and watching videos. It is just a little too powerful, in a good way.

But.

It's 2018, and everything is on the web. HTML5 is mandatory (Steemit is also an HTML5 app, not to mention Grammarly which I use every single day to check my Steemit posts). While we can browse the web with text-based browsers like Lynx (my favourite), it's kinda impossible for me to live with something like this forever...

I can't even access Steemit with this thing. It does not support JavaScript.

So, time to make my life a little easier.

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ALL HAIL THE ARCH WIKI

Seriously, it's a lifesaver. Not only for Arch Linux. If you are using some other Linux distribution and run into some strange issues or is finding some solutions to some of your needs, there's a 99% chance that the Arch Wiki has it. Bonus points if you are using DuckDuckGo as your search engine - just type !archwiki <some search term> and enjoy.

I can actually say that installing a GUI is not hard - it's still that "read the guide and follow it" kind of thing. But still, choosing a GUI is hard, because the wiki won't tell you which GUI is the best - can't blame it, it's always a user choice. How to make it worse - there are dozens of choices to choose from. How to make it insanely worse - I have issues choosing between things. Yes, you may slap me now.

Choices are sometimes obvious anyways, I won't go for GNOME, it's just too heavy for my 4GB RAM. Even Mate is a little too heavy for me. I thought of XFCE, but I don't really have nice memories with it - it does not feel so responsive when I last tried it. LXDE is abandoned and became LXQT, and I don't really like QT when I use more GTK apps. Plus, I am looking for something extremely lightweight. Someone told me that using a sole window manager is a good choice (yes, we can live without a full desktop environment), and I have a good list of them - Openbox, Compiz, i3, and a lot more. After some thinking, I decided that I love keyboard shortcuts more. i3 is the perfect one here. It is a tiling window manager, works perfectly even if you don't have a mouse (since it fully relies on keyboard shortcuts), and is hella lightweight and fast. The funny part is I once said that I don't like i3 because it is a tiling window manager, but thinking of it, it does not feel that bad...at least it makes the desktop organized automatically.

Okay, so what I need to make the thing running? Obviously, the i3 package and the X server. Installing them isn't hard, it's just a few packages like i3, xorg-server, xorg-xinit, etc. Instructions to configure them are also on the Arch Wiki, so I got them in no time. Within a few moments (yea, it took a few moments to install them because everyone was watching election results at live yesterday night. It was an amazing night anyway), I got them correct and typed startx into the terminal and see how it looks like.

i3 by default looks horrible. I'm not even joking. If you don't have a manual with you, there is a 101% chance that you will have absolutely no idea what to do with it, because it does have any buttons, no menus, and it can just show you a bar and cursor. Perfectly explains why it is that lightweight.

Yes, it should look horrible, but when I last tried it with Debian, I didn't see something like this.

I expected some text. At least readable text. REEEEEE.

Whatever, it's some blank boxes, meaning that I am missing some fonts...what to install? Sincerely, I expected them to be installed together with some Xorg package. Apparently not.

So, what's wrong? I dug some information on the net for some Xorg font package that I was missing. Apparently these packages are called xfonts-100dpi or xfonts-75dpi on Ubuntu. Doing a search in the Arch Linux Package Repository gave me xorg-fonts-100dpi and xorg-fonts-75dpi instead. Not a very big headache, I installed it and started X again. There we go, some readable text!

Despite that it is not very helpful at all. It's okay, I don't use the i3 bar anyway, gonna replace it with something else later. I'll just leave it there for the meantime.

Alright, there goes 2 hours of my sleep...took a little longer than I expected. Still way to go, I haven't even got myself a GUI web browser and a huge number of utilities I need...expect something about it in the near future.

See you next time,

--Lilacse