Feedback on current Online i3wm installation

Hello everyone,

To be fair I am very new to tiling window managers, I have been bouncing around between Manjaro i3(bspwm)/InstantOS and many others. My laptop came with Mint 20 when I bought it.

I do not consider myself a real adept, but I am very curious and like to check out new ideas.

So yesterday I installed the i3wm EndeavourOS with the endeavouros-2020.09.20-x86_64.iso.

Here are some of my findings after a good 2 hours of fiddling.

  1. Out of the box there is one part missing: playerctl
  2. Mute did not work as intended: bindsym XF86AudioMute exec amixer sset Master toggle && killall -USR1 i3blocks only mutes, does not unmute, this has to be: bindsym XF86AudioMute exec amixer -D pulse sset Master toggle && killall -USR1 i3blocks

I would personally advise to use the linux-lts kernel by default en let people install a newer one if they desire.

Other than that, it’s true to KISS and really is a breath of sorely missed balance in what is there and what can be tweaked and configured by oneself.

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thanks for feedback, and welcome at the forum :enos:

I will have a look into this looking legit on a first view…
there are also many ways to do it:

bindsym XF86AudioMute exec pamixer -t && notify-send "mute: $(pamixer --get-mute)"
bindsym XF86AudioMute exec pactl set-sink-mute 5 toggle

but it could be that playerctl is not installed, I need to check this.

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Another thing to check out, in the standard installation there is an active and configured Avahi daemon.

I had to correct /etc/nsswitch.conf for it to work correctly:
On the hosts line after myhostname and before resolve, I added: mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]
For my network it turned out mdns4_minimal was faster than mdns_minimal, so you could default to ip4 or leave that to the user to figure out, but then hint to it somewhere.

As for laptop’s, the default config could be pre-populated with the keybindings for controlling backlight.
# Backlight control
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec xbacklight +10
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec xbacklight -10

I have a suggestion for the blur_lock.sh (which is awesome by theway):

sleep 60; pgrep i3lock && xset dpms force off

For a laptop this makes sense to me, locking is walking away so the screen can go off after a timeout.

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