Hi. Taking inspiration from this post I’m sharing my Void Linux setup. As you can see, it’s a very minimalist, KISS, UNIX-like one, as Void Linux is by default. The specs, commented:

Window manager: Openbox. Because it’s lightweight and fast, pretty “naked” by default, but you can do whatever you want with it. As you can see, I don’t use toolbars, but neither app launchers, archive managers (GUI nor CLI, I just type my way through the system), not even a wallpaper is set. This is because I spend here most of the time on the terminal and maybe browsing the web or reading some PDF docs. The key for everything are keyboard shortcuts: I can launch apps, work around windows (close, minimize, resize, cycling, tiling…), control sound and brightness , take a screenshot… Just by the right shortcut. Trackpad is mostly to select fields on Firefox and so on.

Web browsers: Firefox. Because it’s FOSS and does everything is expected from a browser inside the over complicated bloat mess that modern web pages are. And links because, believe it or not, a CLI web browser has its use cases nowadays. I don’t need, say, Firefox if I’m just going to read some wiki article.

Terminal: st. Because, you know, it’s so simple and fast. I just patch it to have scrollback, and add some padding and a background colour slightly lighter than black, so it won’t disappear inside the black background.

Shell: dash, which doesn’t even have tab completion, it’s really minimal. I love to type full commands and folder directions I guess. ;)

Text editor: vi or vim If I write some code -I’m trying to learn Python ATM- I use vim, just vi for a casual dotfile edit and so on. It’s a prefered choice for a lot of hackers (I mean, people who know their way around computer issues), and once you get to it you understand why. I have WordGrinder too, which I use for non-coding text, it also runs on CLI and lets you export to markdown, html, odt…

Music player: moc (Music on Console). And that’s it, a handy music player which runs on terminal emulators and is as featherweight as a music player can be.

PDF viewer: Zathura Because it’s nice, has vim-like shortcuts and the minimal bloat, it seems.

Image viewer: feh. Small, powerful and command-line based, it lets you set a wallpaper and view pics, and that’s mostly it.

System monitor: Conky. As I don’t have background daemons, toolbar applets or anything watchdog-ing my laptop’s battery, something that prints charge levels on screen seems handy, and it is. And I can check date/hour, system temp and stuff included with the admitance fee. ;) To have it always on view I have a top margin so windows are not covering the conky “toolbar”.

And that’s mostly it. No systemd and not much in the background (tlp, ufw, wpa_supplicant, acpid, the ttys and that’s moslty it), it starts with ~100 MB RAM, it’s a couple of seconds until passes the BIOS screen and you can login, and the battery lasts for long, long hours.

I love CLI, I love KISS, I love simple things, and I can be more productive and spend my time better when I’m with a computer this way.

Greetings.