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Comment by nvy | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested in reading a writeup on this subject; I've always enjoyed running linux without a DE but the awful text rendering makes it a sub-par experience. I have one of the lcdfans modded thinkpads running Fedora and awesomewm in lieu of gnome shell.

But I still have most of gnome involved because something in there somewhere makes things look "nice" and if you just do a barebones install of X/wayland plus your WM of choice, things tend to look awful, and frankly I haven't got time nor energy to figure out what the magic sauce is.

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It used to be that you have to fiddle with a lot of fontconfig settings to get decent rendering results, but they've been shipping mostly sane defaults for quite a while now.

Hinting for some reason still has to be enabled manually, but very lightweight tools like `lxappearance` make that a single click, if you don't want to touch XML by hand.

For the past 15 years, my desktop has been

• openbox (also handles keyboard shortcuts etc., can be configured visually with obconf, which can also handle font settings iirc)

• picom (for compositing; before, the tools it was forked from)

• dunst (for notifications)

• arandr (for configuring external displays)

• flameshot (for screenshotting)

• Random LXDE bits as necessary (lxpanel at the absolute minimum, lxsession when I need to deal with polkit things, lxappearance sometimes)

It doesn't do much in terms of system configuration etc., but I didn't find I need much anyway these days. Printers etc. I no longer use, and most system settings can be configured with systemd's localectl/timedatectl once and left alone.

>lxappearance

My understanding is that lxappearance is for GTK stuff only; is there a similar tool for Qt-based stuff?

I set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qgnomeplatform in my xinitrc and don't care further, seems to work fine.

This is my DE free terminal-centric setup:

https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u

It took me about 3 weeks to figure everything out. You ideally need to use a distro where you can build from scratch (Arch/NixOS/Void/etc) if you want to truly be minimal. If you are OK using NixOS I can give you my configuration.nix.

I have the same problem

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