Switching to Regolith

  • \o/

Switching to Regolith

Fri Sep 06 2019
2 minute read

The only thing I've been writing about seem to be desktop environments lately, especially i3 and kde.

Some time ago I found Regolith Linux which is an Ubuntu derivate on the one hand, and a ppa with a set of packages on the other hand. I guess most smaller Ubuntu derivates work like this, but that is not the point.

Quoting from their website:

Regolith Linux is a distro for people that prefer a spartan interface with polished and consistent system management. It brings together a trifecta of Ubuntu’s ubiquity, i3-wm’s efficient and productive interface, and Gnome’s system configuration features.

So in short it seems to be i3, with a set of preconfigured defaults, and the one thing I was missing when not running a full desktop environment, but just a standalone window manager - the system settings stuff.

So I tried it out by installing the packages from the ppa and nearly everything worked out of the box, with a few small things I had to tweak.

  • reintegrate dmenu over rofi, but maybe rofi could be fixed for me
  • copy parts of my old i3 config, carefully merging it to theirs
  • fixing the workspace names for i3-wk-switch to work again, not 100% there
  • this was a hard one: uninstalling ibus, because it claims ctrl-shift-u without any means to undo that (in the version in 18.04) and I absolutely need that shortcut daily in Qt Creator (as this is my work laptop)

Also some config things I merged or I'm using both versions because I am still undecided what I like best:

  • win-p starts rofi in default mode, using .desktop files
  • win-shift-p starts dmenu in my old config, also having ~/bin/*
  • win-enter starts st, regolith's default terminal
  • win-shift-enter starts terminator, my default terminal

RAM usage so far seems to be a tiny bit better, but I've not measured it, objectively or otherwise.

But overall, I'm 99% happy with Regolith so far and while I still have a few tweaks to do - none of them pressing issues, actually most of it is my stuff ignoring their color scheme, so a lot of black over bluish, and I don't care - I really like it and it fixed all the weird small problems I had with the unorthodox i3+plasma setup.