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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like the perfect desktop for i3.

Edit: i3 window manager: https://i3wm.org/

Assuming you mean Intel i3 CPUs - these are more than fast enough for plain vanilla Ubuntu (not that there aren't other reasons to want a minimal system).

Even (new) celeron/sempron are probably plenty fast for Ubuntu.

Pretty sure he is refering to i3, the tiling window manager software.

Ah ok! Never heard of it.

Yeah the window manager.

I only want a tiling window manager, a couple of browsers, Sublime Text 3, and access to the internet.

My personal opinion is that i3 rocks, and and that I don't need all of Ubuntu or Xubuntu. I don't even need Rhythmbox or Thunar. Just give me the bare bones of a modern Linux upon which I can install i3 and add just the few things I need.

Any recommendations/guides for how to get i3 running in Xubuntu Core using VirtualBox on a MacBook Pro?

http://i3wm.org/docs/repositories.html

I probably followed the instructions on that page for using the i3 repos, but it's been long enough that I can't remember doing it or how I did it. But I am using their repos. I don't notice anything explicitly different or better, but i3 isn't one of those things where you're waiting for a new gizmo with anticipation; it just puts up your windows and shuts up about it.

I'm on LinuxMint.

All window-managers are pretty straight forward under linux. Read the documentation.

Just did this myself. The i3 docs didn't cover the topic.

sudo apt-get install i3; xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -p /sessions/Failsafe/Client0_Command -t string -s "i3wm" -t string -s "--replace" -a # logout, login

The problem was then that the Alt key wasn't being recognized, possibly due to VirtualBox.

Well, that just means that an regular (x/k)ubuntu isn't necessarily the distro you're looking for. Back in the days when I was using Linux on my main computer, canonical shipped a stripped down version of ubuntu (ubuntu server maybe ?) where you could install just what you need and nothing else (I beleive it came without a window manager for instance).

What you're describing was pretty much my Archlinux setup btw. It was just more convinient for me to build it from an archlinux than a regular ubuntu. You could with an ubuntu though, it'd just be a lot more work I feel like.

EDIT: turns out I'm pretty much explaining you what you already know.... I'll leave my comment up anyway, maybe it'll help someone else.

> My personal opinion is that i3 rocks, and and that I don't need all of Ubuntu or Xubuntu

Getting there with Ubuntu was pretty much "apt-get install" when I made the switch to i3wm. Sure, you end up carrying along hundreds of MB of "junk", but I just didn't find it worth the hassle to trim it down - I have far more junk than that in form of data of my own I could delete...

You would be better off using an Alternate Lubuntu CD or netinstall (mini.iso) Both have a text-based installer with the option to 'Install a command line system', then go from there.

I'm figuring how to install an awesome WM with MATE, lately. https://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Quickly_Setting_up_Awesome... http://askubuntu.com/questions/616520/how-do-i-set-up-awesom...

Or any window manager that isn't part of the Gnome/KDE environment, for that matter. Personally, I love the idea of a trimmed down distro that allows you to install whatever packages you want on your own. Package managers make that easy, and I hate the bloat on most standard desktop distros.

The X in Xubuntu has a dedicated meaning.

Supposedly XFCE plays quite nicely with other window managers replacing xfwm.

Very much so that I'm trying them both right now.

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