I used bspwm for years after using i3wm. It was exactly how I wanted things. If you’re staying on Xorg, bspwm is great. Nowadays I find Niri more streamlined though.

I see. It seems river changed a lot since last time I used it. Now I’m intrigued, it adopts the old ways. Maybe I should check it again because I haven’t seen a lighter WM/compositor for Wayland yet.

I used river for quite some time when I moved over to Wayland from bspwm. I still find it great for configuring from scratch.

No idea what are beansprout and rhine though.

Sometimes both. I recently started using an old Macbook with Void, which they have notorious broadcom-wl, so I searched a lot and a got a micro network adapter. It was actually quite hard to find with a working driver because Realtek. Anyway this one I found seemed to had a dkms driver on Void repo, so I went with that.

The dkms driver gives bunch of errors for some reason. I didn’t have time to debug it and just compiled from Github. Naturally I have to compile it every kernel update. I probably can add a hook for it but haven’t done that yet because lazy.

Edit: Added a kernel hook. It’s not harder than writing this comment. :)

It actually happens naturally, or it should at least. So don’t mind anyone. Distrohop until you find yourself settled.

You seem to know enough distros. If none of them exactly clicked with you perfectly, continue your search.

I stayed on Arch-based for more than 10 years and it was suppose to be temporary for me as I was keep saying that to myself. In reality I was settled. So, don’t mind others, find it yourself. It will happen sooner ot later.

P.S.

Void is good.

Maybe MX Linux with Fluxbox?

I’m not addicted, I’m doing that for 20 years and I can quit whenever I want.

IIRC both Noctalia v4 and DMS are quickshell based, probably that’s why they look similar. Noctalia v5 has its own thing. v5 is not as customizable as v4 at the moment but it will get there, worth looking for.

A little anecdot from my Thinkpad X201, both v4 and v5 are heavy for it, though v5 supposedly have better performance, however still slow in my opinion. Both fine on my main PC. Color generation is also nice by the way, saved me from mingling with Kvantum, Qt, GTK themes etc. Also generates terminal themes, even has a separate theme for btop.

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard for years. Hope they’re doing fine.

There are still distros that support 32-bit besides Debian 12, like Alpine and Void. Until when, that’s unknown.

My Thinkpad (X201) can’t even play Terraria well but I love it. :)

I just use Foliate but on my current system Foliate has a weird bug for me that it cannot open any books for some reason so I’m using Readest now.

To be fair, testing in a VM is for seeing the basic fundamentals of the OS. Ok, let me try to help with a couple of things then.

For finding you distro:

1. Find your favourite environment. Is it GNOME, is it KDE, Cinnamon, maybe it’s Xmonad or dwm? There are a lot of these and you should test this first. Distro doesn’t really matter in this step. Just find one with the desired environment and test it in a VM.
2. Once you find your perfect environment, find out if you want a really stable system or something cutting edge? Maybe something balanced in between. Distro still doesn’t matter in this step. Once you decide what you want, now you can find distros that suit this.
3. Choose you favourite init system (Optional). Some people like to control what’s under the hood. Just note that, not choosing systemd will filter a lot of distros here. If you don’t care what’s under the hood, skip this step.
4. Now you have narrowed down to possibly 3-10 distros. Still a lot. However this step is where you choose your favourite package manager. If you don’t care about the mechanism, just pick one you liked from the default installations of them. If you are using Linux for some time, you might already have a favourite package manager.
5. Congratulations, you have found your distro. Just use it and see for yourself.
6. Wait, it might still not be the correct one. However you cannot know this without using them daily. Some people stay with what distro they start, some people distrohop a lot and settle on Debian. And some other love their niche distro that works nicely for them. Stay with what really clicks with you.

Why don’t you try distros in a virtual machine first?

Then Sway might be a better fit for you. Though I definitely recommend Niri, since it’s a fresh look for tiling WMs.

Sway is also nice if you prefer more traditional tiling WM.

I suggest Void Linux and putting Niri + noctalia-shell on it.

I actually like systemd-boot more than GRUB. I see it for 1 second, so I really don’t see the point of theming a bootloader but this is the world of freedom. Any preference is welcome.

Technically it’s a pop-up. You cannot use the window behind when that’s open. If you try to carry the pop-up, it will also carry the main window.

My initial reason was computation freedom. It got so much better in years, I just take the rest as a great bonus.