I decided to give EndeavourOS a try. I have heard nothing but fantastic things from friends who run the distro and I am ready to jump in. I was wondering what DE you guys would suggest for my needs? I’m not ultra picky (though I’m not a huge fan of KDE). I mainly use my PC for everyday things like the internet, email, etc. I am a writer, so I use it for work and creative writing and I also do some light gaming through Steam. These are my PC specs:
Ryzen 7 1800X CPU
AMD RX 480 GPU
16GB Memory
250GB SSD (Use for Root/Boot/Swap)
1TB HDD (Use for /Home)
Three Full HD 23" Monitors
Thanks for any recommendation and I’m super excited to be part of the community.
If you want something solid and easy to understand out of the box, I would suggest XFCE. It’s what I settled on initially when making the move from win10 to linux. If you want to get a little “out there” and try a tiling WM I would suggest bspwm (and I would be happy to help with any set-up, questions, etc).
I have been interested in TWM, though I’m not super techie and I don’t really understand how to set everything up from scratch with config files and stuff. I also use a lot of programs and stuff that are not in the terminal…so I’m not sure how useful a TWM would be for me. I do like XFCE, I just wasn’t sure how well it is implemented on EndeavourOS. Sometimes it looks/runs like dookie.
There is an EOS theme set up for XFCE, which I would say isn’t bland at all. XFCE is also what runs on the live iso, so you could try that out on there, before committing to the full install.
I would go Cinnamon. It will be the easiest to start with. The only setting you need to change is in menu/effects set window effects off. This is necessary to alleviate transparency with the welcome app boxes. Cinnamon should be excellent otherwise i would go Xfce.
Are the TWM super complicated? I’ve watched some videos on YT and they seems like a lot of work. Also, do you think they would even be useful for what I am looking to use my PC for on a daily basis?
Something like bspwm is very customizable, so you can make it what you need. I added it after having this pc set up with XFCE, so I still “cheat” and use some of the XFCE programs for things (thunar for file explorer, etc) and I use the mouse a decent bit as well. It’s all a matter of what you want to do and what works best for you. You can always start off with the defaults for the config files and edit them as you learn more about the options and how things work.
Yeah, I would still want to use my mouse for stuff too. I do like the idea of WM…but again, I use a lot of non-terminal programs. Is it still worth while for those?
I agree with @pudge. If you are mouse oriented stick to a DE. If not and have an affinity to memorizing keyboard shortcuts TWM can work. The learning curve is quite a bit steeper than a DE though. Once you get past that it’s not that hard. I switched to TWM (i3) about a month ago? Now i curse at my windows work pc because a window doesn’t close everytime I hit $mod+C
I would suggest going with XFCE - for one thing, it is available as an offline install! (quicker). It is also a good ‘base’ for later experimentation if you decide to investigate a WM later on.
On another note - a good partition setup would be / (root - including /home) EFI and swap - then link your data directories (soft or hard links) to the spinner. This gives you the same separation of data, but retains the speed of access to everything else - where it is most noticeable. I’ll drop a little command sequence here for setting that up if you’re not familiar with it…
Set up data drive
The first thing is to get your UUIDs:
sudo blkid
Then, make an entry in your /etc/fstab file, such as:
After a reboot, and checking that /mnt/data mounted correctly:
cd ~
rmdir Documents
ln -s /mnt/data/Documents Documents
rmdir Downloads
ln -s /mnt/data/Downloads Downloads
rmdir Music
ln -s /mnt/data/Music Music
rmdir Pictures
ln -s /mnt/data/Pictures Pictures
rmdir Public
ln -s /mnt/data/Public Public
rmdir Videos
ln -s /mnt/data/Videos Videos
Obviously do this BEFORE you put anything in any of those directories When you are done, the data is separately accessible for backing up - and everything else is easily replaced. Enjoy!
When you are done, the data is separately accessible for backing up - and everything else is easily replaced. Enjoy!