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Regolith Linux

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173 pointsthunderbong50 comments

I've never been as productive in anything as I have in this.

Whoever came up with the default key combinations is a genius.

I'd heard people talk about i3 and other tiling WM's, but it seemed like a big step to take to learn and take the time to configure it, etc.

I found out about Regolith, figured "Eh since it also comes as an apt package I can just install + uninstall it if I don't like it."

By the end of using it a single day I was used to the keybindings. They felt natural and my productivity was through the roof.

Bless the authors, this software brings joy.

I tried regolith for a few days and am now using arch with sway window manager. From what I remember, regolith was mostly default i3 bindings along with a handy cheat sheet that would pop up. I agree completely about the productivity boost.

To give you an idea, I have been trying to get into vim for year. Several tentatives. Only now I am starting to be able to code for a day in it when I am stranded on a remote machine.

For i3, it took me couple of days. I am so much more efficient with it. No more moving windows around, no more alt-tabbing again again to find that terminal, where is it already?!

I always have my browser, my music in the same workspace, etc.

It's a small investment with a big reward.

Manjaro i3wm version is just like this. It’s out there for years, so it’s more mature. Also, it is built on top of arch linux, so it’s much less bloated, and you get the arch linux guides which are the easiest and most polished I’ve found on any distribution.

I've had nothing but bad experiences with Manjaro's i3 spin (though I do like both Manjaro and Arch, fwiw)

- Manjaro's i3wm lacks a universal theming application like the one Regolith has

- Manjaro's config is not stored as a package manifest

- The out-of-the-box experience is quite poor, it didn't ship with a network manager until quite recently iirc

- The default appearance is quite ugly and barebones

- There is no popup for keybind hints

Honestly, I think their Sway spin is more well-maintained, and that's coming from someone who hates Wayland with a passion unlike anything else.

It's basically default i3 key bindings here.

I tried Regolith and it is nice. But ultimately I found MATE with i3 set as its window manager is better. It's a truly excellent combo.

For anyone curious, here's how I set it up: https://mattgreer.dev/blog/mate-and-i3/

That workspace switcher applet is an excellent idea. I have to applaud that level of commitment to the concept!

The github repo for the applet is archived - does it all still work OK?

I’ve been using this on both my work and home machines for a few years and I can wholeheartedly recommend it (if you check my comment history you’ll see I have several time in the past).

It’s just an install and switch at the login screen to try it out. Once you login press Win/Meta+? for a nice help menu of shortcuts.

<OT> I misread it and thought is was an update to REGoth[1][2], the Gothic FOSS engine recreation. Had really high hopes, that that project revived. Too bad.

[1] https://github.com/REGoth-project/REGoth

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4BQGjm05c429iWF_OUe7GQ

</OT>

Big fan of tiling WMs, with sway being my daily driver. Always interested in new takes on that UX style.

It doesn't look bad, but why make an entire distro for a WM/DE setup? It would have wider appeal if it was available as a package.

Its a package and not a distro

Homepage says it's based on Ubuntu and...

They provide two install methods: 1. Regolith Desktop via Repository (PPA) 2. ISO image with Regolith on Ubuntu

I think that just means it has tendrils into the Ubuntu ecosystem stuff like package management. People have ported equivalent things to other distros though, e.g.: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/regolith-full

I've been using i3 daily for about 8 years. I've been using regolith for the last 2 or 3 years because they've integrated everything so nicely with the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Have been using i3 for maybe 10 years now; it's at the very core of my daily computing experience.

Regolith running application search looks useful -- nice project.

Thanks for posting this. Decided to install it as a package and give it a try, so far I'm quite impressed.

Looks interesting. I am using a similar setup with Debian 11 + KDE and i3 and urxvt in Damon mode. You get all the benefits of Settings, Network Manager, Keychain etc. and just use i3 as your Window Manager

I used to have Gnome. But since switched to KDE5 as I read that KDE 5 takes less memory than Gnome 3

Heads up here regarding KD. Since you're using Debian I guess you don't have the latest. At one point I think Debian will switch to KDE Systemd, and it will break your login script that launches i3. A solution is to use Systemd units[0] at one point I might write a blog post about that.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30256384

Why so many cli-focused users are so interested by CPU usage/temp, net throughput and extra stats in the status bar, like in the main screenshot? Yeah I kmow it's a status bar so it should display status, but as a CLI user myself I'm genuinely curious because if I want to know what's happening, I just have a look at top or similar tooling, then I close it and continue with my tasks. Do you change your behavior based on the status of the system? Are you checking it very often?

For me it's just an easy way to notice if something is unexpectedly eating up resources, then I know to pull up htop to figure out what it is and kill it if needed.

For me because in these sort of bespoke Linux setups I've found that temp / mem usage needs to be watched for spikes a lot more than something like my Mac. I run a fairly large typescript monorepo, and when I'm also running a zoom screenshare it's something I need to be aware of.

I'm running an arch setup, and because it's fairly barebones I needed to learn about temp / power control regulators like TLP.

What I always missed when dealing with i3 is sane defaults. i3 right after installing is ugly and needs small tweaks in config to fit to my needs. Regolith is exactly what I needed: you install it and it's usable right away. Too bad it's specific to Ubuntu, I wish I could use it on other distros as well

For anyone this may matter to, keep in mind that Regolith doesn't support Wayland (as i3 is for X only). To me that's a deal breaker. It would be nice to see Regolith picking up support for Sway/Wayland instead of i3.

I have been using the same distro/tiling wm setup since 2015. A bare bones debian netinstall with dwm and xorg.

This reminds me of crunchbang linux from years back. It was a simple config of xfce and conky based on debian.

They must've had more than that. My laptop did not work with Debian out of the box, but it did with Crunchbang.

I use Bunsenlabs, one of the successors of Crunchbang. (There are a couple others). You can use the vanilla version, built on top of debian, or add the repositories to devuan.

[0]: https://bunsenlabs.org

Crunchbang was based on openbox and not xfce.

Would be pretty easy to update my NixOS i3 profile to match most of the functionality here. The only part I'm not sure of is the Gnome Flashback integration. Looks there's a Nix package for it, so I suspect getting a clone of this working on Nix would be a single shareable config file.

Before I jumped off the GNOME ecosystem altogether, I used (and really liked!) Regolith on most of my devices. If you're new to Linux but want an out-of-the-box TWM setup, this really is the way to go. If they make a rolling-release version sometime I may have to give it a whirl again.

“Regality Linux” is misleading. Perhaps should be called “Regolith Desktop Environment”? It’s not a full distro.

“Regolith is a modern desktop environment designed to let you work faster by reducing unnecessary clutter and ceremony. Built on top of Ubuntu, GNOME, and i3,”

For the upcoming 2.0 release, they are actually planning to rebrand as “Regolith Desktop Environment,” as well as adding Debian support.

Excellent, that was my first question. It looks super nice and if it's well polished I might choose it over my cobbled-together i3 setup, but I don't wanna go from debian back to ubuntu. :P

Technically it is a distro because it is distributed as one - with an installer that installs a modified Ubuntu.

Can anyone who used both this and PopOS compare their experiences?

Will try once they release the version based on Ubuntu 22.04.

Will this soon be available in 22.04 variant ?

Yes! The project leader posted a pic of progress on the Regolith Slack a few days ago. No ETA that I know of but swing by the Slack to stay up to date. [1]

[1] https://regolith-linux.herokuapp.com/

I had a hard time understanding this message. In the context of linux distributions, it seemed to me that there were ubuntu-based and slack-based distributions for regolith. This sounds really cool because slack is bare-bones and it means that regolith has made a conscious effort at portability. But this is not the case, and it has nothing to do with slackware.

I think it’s talking about the messaging app named Slack.

this looks a nice replacement for the openbox set up in crunchbang which I really loved.

Looks like it's closed source. Several GitHub repos, but only for things like issues and building ISOs.

What? It's mostly just plain text configs for i3 which is open source on it's own. There's a whole Github project here: https://github.com/regolith-linux

Oh, there's no actual code involved? My bad!

Can you update Gnome to 42 with regolith ?

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