2.a. Installation (X11 enviroment)

INSTALLATION

The desktop environment is based on 5 fundamental software:

• i3-gaps: tiling window manager
• polybar: status bars to show important info
• picom: windows compositor
• rofi: application launcher, window switcher and much more (calculator too!)
• dunst: notification daemon

All these software are "linked" together with my scripts, so that they can all work together as one.

Important

Before proceeding installing the environment, make sure to update your system. For Arch users:

sudo pacman -Syu

Setting up needed packages

Note

For Arch users: some needed packages are not in official repositories and can be found in the Arch User Repositories

Make sure you're familiar with how to build and installing packages from the AUR. The base-devel package is necessary.

sudo pacman -S base-devel

For other users, refer to your system guides on how to install the following packages.

Fonts

The environment uses the following fonts:

• sans-serif: Lato
• serif: Liberation
• monospace: Source Code Pro (or its NerdFont patched version)

It's advised to install all of them in order to correctly display text and icons, and later change them as you like

For Arch users:

sudo pacman -S ttf-sourcecodepro-nerd ttf-lato ttf-liberation

The dotfiles also come with a fontconfig rule to specify preferred fonts.

To make sure the rule has been correctly loaded

fc-conflist | grep 60-simonvic-prefs.conf

If the output starts with + (plus) sign, it means it has been loaded.

If the output starts with - (dash) sign, it means it has not been loaded. Doing the following should fix it:

ln -s ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/60-simonvic-prefs.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

If the rule has been loaded, check that it's actually working

fc-match sans-serif
fc-match serif
fc-match monospace
fc-match nerdfont

This should be the output

Lato-Regular.ttf: "Lato" "Regular"
LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf: "Liberation Serif" "Regular"
NotoSansMono-Regular.ttf: "Noto Sans Mono" "Regular"
SauceCodeProNerdFontPropo-Regular.ttf: "SauceCodePro Nerd Font Propo" "Regular"

If the output is different, check if there are any other rules taking precedence over 60-simonvic-prefs.conf FontConfig wiki

GTK and Icon theme

1. Install vimix-icon-theme

   git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/vimix-icon-theme.git
   cd vimix-icon-theme
   makepkg -si

2. Install vimix-gtk-theme

   git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/vimix-gtk-themes.git
   cd vimix-gtk-themes
   makepkg -si

3. Set the theme

   Add the following to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

   [Settings]
   gtk-theme-name=vimix-dark-ruby
   gtk-icon-theme-name=Vimix-Ruby-dark
   gtk-font-name=Sans 11

Installing the packages

To be able to launch the i3-gaps window manager you need xorg and, unless you don't want to manually start xorg with xinit, you should install a display manager.
Personally I love ly; other alternatives can be found here

1. Install xorg

   It's suggested to install the entire group

   sudo pacman -S xorg

2. Assuming you worked so far from the tty shell, you should install a terminal emulator if you haven't already

3. I suggest using pipewire as your sound/video server

4. Install some other dependencies

   sudo pacman -S feh numlockx wget rofi-calc libnotify redshift xclip scrot imagemagick playerctl xss-lock xdg-utils

5. Install i3lock-color (lockscreen)

   git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/i3lock-color.git
   cd i3lock-color
   makepkg -si

6. If you need bluetooth, install bluez

   sudo pacman -S bluez bluez-utils

   and enable/start the bluetooth.service

   sudo systemctl enable --now bluetooth.service

7. We can now install the main packages

   sudo pacman -S i3-gaps picom rofi dunst polybar

8. Reboot your system to make sure the changes have taken effect

9. Give a star to the repo https://github.com/simonvic/dotfiles :)

10. Enjoy!