Qtile Community Edition - General Discussion

Desktop Environments All WMs
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This thread is for discussion on the Qtile community edition, because people seem to like the idea (Qtile edition?)

Here are some ideas I have. Please feel free to comment on anything!

Bar - I think we can use the inbuilt Qtile bar. It’s extremely powerful and should be more than good enough. Otherwise there are polybar with widgets or xfce4-panel. https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/kzd6zt/qtile_genome/ this looks like a good bar setup that we might be able to adapt.

Terminal - xfce4-terminal has an Endaveour colorscheme and is pretty nice, so I’m thinking we can use that. Seems that there are some problems in ARM with Kitty/UXTerm/Alacritty according to @OdiousImp

File Manager - I’m thinking Nemo for this one. Not too many dependencies (although there is a bit of cinnamon stuff it pulls in), and has pretty much every feature most people would want. Alternatively, Thunar and PCManFM are good options.

Login Manager - I personally really like Gdm, but probably Lightdm because it’s what endaveour uses already

Settings - I’m thinking of something unique for this one. I can write a program that provides a GUI interface to do things like set gtk themes (probably the qt part can be redirected to qt5ct/qt6ct), manage displays, set some qtile settings, and more.

Compositor - I don’t know of anything that picom doesn’t have. Maybe set it up with blur. Not sure on that one.

Default Gtk/Qt theme - Qt5 theme probably will be gtk2 to be consistent. I really wish there was a gtk3 style. The gtk theme, I’m not sure. I really like Cinnamon’s Mint-Y-Dark-Purple, and it fits the enOS colors so perfectly. No compatibility issues I think

lock screen - Qtile’s awesome scriptability in Python (although I wish it was something else, maybe I should continue with writing my own wm!) lets us use anything. here is what might be a useful reference: https://gist.github.com/koehlma/3834957#file-config-py-L68 so I think I might use xfce4-screensaver. or gnome-screensaver. not sure.

wallpaper - http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/_modules/libqtile/widget/wallpaper.html plus some eos art, maybe from community members or myself.

workspace setup - http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/manual/config/groups.html, probably I’ll use numbers for the names.

font - As far as monospace goes, I love Mononoki Nerd Font ( I think we can vendor that in like sway edition vendors in Ioveska ). Post your suggestions on fonts here! not sure if I should use a monospace or sans-serif font for the rest of the UI tho. for sans-serif I vote for Ubuntu, Droid Sans, or Clear Sans.

launcher - rofi is great. stealing i3 spin’s config is probably the best thing to do.

text editor - micro is my personal preference in the CLI; I use it as a GUI one too. Whatever the community wants of course!

screenshot app - idk, gnome-screenshot? xfce4-screenshot? i’ve never had a preference, they all just work fine.

notifications - http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/_modules/libqtile/widget/notify.html but maybe we can use Dunst.

polkit handler - gnome’s, xfce’s, lxde’s, mate’s, etc, or maybe a custom one. Mate’s in particular looks small and forkable: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-polkit/tree/master/src

default layout - I love the bsp one.

gaps - same amount as i3 edition probs

Contributing:
I have no idea how the build process works, like how I generate an ISO. I am looking at the sway code to try to adapt it, but please enlighten me!

If anyone has any comment or suggestion, or if there is anything I have missed, please post it. If you’d like to volunteer to work on any part, please go ahead!

Once there is a configuration done in a Git repository, it’d be great if people can clone and test (ideally not in production setups).

Here is the temporary Git repository: https://github.com/codic12/EosQtile

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I agree with that, it is also running with all the qtile widgets, if that is acceptable great! cpu, battery, volume, etc all in there and tweakable.

I am currently using cinnamon and qtile (since Saturday). With high dpi screen nemo is scaling my fonts oddly large in qtile, whereas using thunar everything seems ok. I will test it further. Like nemo too…

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Temp Eos stock Wallpaper. until you find one EOS_Qtile-no-ARM-2

" https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Shjim-Arch/Files/main/EOS_Qtile-no-ARM-2.png "

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As far as I know, the in built bar in Qtile doesn’t lack any major feature. So refrain from using external bar programs unless there is some functionality there really necessary and Qtile doesn’t have it.

Terminal - Xfce4-terminal seems fine. I am not sure about this, but Termite can also work on ARM.

Login manager - lets stick with LightDM

Settings - Will need discussion about the GUI thing you suggest. Apart from the welcome app, we don’t have any app to help manage settings. If you have an idea for something that provides functionality without dumbing down things, it will be nice to have. Make sure we discuss this before you actually start working on this app. A have some basic knowledge of Gtk, maybe I can be of some help.

Compositor - picom with transparency. No blur by default, because that can be taxing for old systems. Again, this is open for discussion.

Default Gtk theme - Up till now, the editions followed Arc theme. Can’t suggest anything by myself here. Are we targeting Qt theming? Bspwm edition does not have it and I suppose the default Endeavour OS Xfce theme does not have Qt theming.

Lock screen - if Qt has an in built solution, that would be great. Otherwise there is i3 lock fancy script that I used in bspwm edition.

Wallpaper - let the community make artwork :wink:

Font - Monospace for sure. Prefer font that is in the arch repos. About Iosevka, I am not sure how the Sway edition is using it. For the bspwm edition, I would’ve stuck to the repository fonts, but polybar has weird scaling issues with icon fonts, and to my knowledge, the specific variant of Iosevka I added did not result in the issue.

launcher - Rofi, although, I personally feel it would be good to experiment with other apps if you have anything in mind.

Text-editor - Nano, vi comes preinstalled. There’s mousepad in bspwm editions. Is micro having some cool features that can make it a good contender?

Screenshot app - scrot (easy to use)

notifications - If Qtile has a native implementation, better to go for it. Dunst is also cool tho.

Contributing : Create a repository under your GitHub profile. We work on it for now. Share a link here, so we know where to send our PR to. Don’t worry about ISO now. netinstall file can be added later.
Refer existing community edition repositories and notice the install script. You need to have the required packages in a file like this and the script should install these packages and copy the dotfiles. Look at this for a reference.

Later when its ready, its added to the EndeavourOS org and you will have push access to the specific repository you contributed.

Feel free to tag me or @OdiousImp (do we have your permission?) if you need any help regarding this.

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huh, that’s interesting, maybe there is a bug in nemo?

Yeah, for sure

Oh, I’ve actually never used one of the community editions, I should try them. Then Arc it is, that’s perfect!

Oh, no Sway isn’t using it, I confused it with the bspwm edition. I see.

I like mousepad as a gui editor too. It does have some cool features but I’m not sure if it’s worth breaking from the rest so maybe we’ll just leave nano and vi. For gui editors I think it’s worth checking out Cinnamon’s xed which is very powerful.

I just forked the sway edition here: https://github.com/codic12/EosQtile

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Great, thank you! Excellent art as always :smiley:

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Create a new empty repository for Qtile. Otherwise the commits from Sway edition will also end up there (and we don’t need them)

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Made an empty repo in the same link

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http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/manual/ref/widgets.html#checkupdates could replace eos-update-notifier

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I use the deadd-notification-center in my wm installs, that is worth a look.

+1 micro, it is the easiest cli editor.

Will load up my qtile install later, just in from work :smiley:

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That looks great but it’s not in the repos unfortunately

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I’ve pushed the default Qtile configuration to the repository, and the netinstall file, so that we can start making changes.

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I have this snippet below to keep my autostarts in a script:

import os
import subprocess
from libqtile import hook


@hook.subscribe.startup_once
def autostart():
    home = os.path.expanduser('~/.config/qtile/autostart.sh')
    subprocess.call([home])
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Totally endaveour! but hey, it’s a config file :wink:
2021-04-26-101354_1920x1200_scrot

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Just my 2 cents.
If I am not using gedit, I like xed from a coding aspect as it supports syntax highlighting.
I’m not sure if mousepad supports syntax highlighting or not.

Since tiling WMs are popular with developers, syntax highlighting would be a great thing to have.

Pudge

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I agree!

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An update:

Nemo and thunar are great but they pull in Cinnamon and Xfce dependencies respectively. Instead, I’m adding pcmanfm-gtk3 for now.

Powerline has also been added to the install files, it just needs to be configured in the bar.

For the editor I went with Xed.

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1 question. you decide on terminal? I interested see how this run on ARM… . if i can help let me know

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Syntax highlighting is one of the advantages that micro brings to the table (while being lightweight like nano). Mousepad does NOT have it done well, nor does leafpad (featherpad is the usual answer there). Xed is pretty good - but any editor is such a personal choice that a minimal capability (at least nano - preferably micro) should be all that is needed - the end user can add whatever fits his/her needs best (Sublime Text - vsCode - whatever). Anything beyond that could be considered 'bloat" :grin: (inevitably SOMEONE will claim that).

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Not sure how much xfce4-terminal pulls in - but it is nice to have a simply configured terminal with a drop-down mode built-in as well. I tend to take it with me to other DEs when I ‘travel’…

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