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Ask HN: What are some high quality Linux theme resources?

8 points by dfischer ↗ HN
To make a long story short, I'm done with my MacBook Pro. The keyboard is terrible; and there isn't enough ram.

I ordered a Lenovo X1 Extreme G2 with 64GB ram.

I haven't ran Linux personally since Stage 1 Gentoo. I wasted so much time making that thing "cool."

I'm actually excited to hack around back in that world again. Any resources that exist for the higher end of aesthetics? What's the latest on window managers these days? Best terminal?

Thanks!

15 comments

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mister_hn
You should join definitively the SubReddit /r/unixporn, it is full of examples (and sources) of amazing customizations
ktpsns
Cool. I also started with Gentoo, then used Win for half a decade but turned back to Linux by using Ubuntu, the Unity desktop environment. Eventually, I am a KDE guy, but GNOME3 is surprisingly hackable with CSS and JavaScript, IIRC. I don't like tiling window managers, but if you seek for minimalism and geekyness, you should try i3m and friends.

In any way, I also had a powerful X1 for three years and it's a breeze. It is so fast that even big (don't want to say bloat...) software such as KDE starts quickly.

newman8r
i3wm is worth trying out for at least a week to see if it's right for you. It only takes a day to get used to - it's a small time investment for the payoff and there's a lot of customization available.
FourSigma
Take a look at Regolith Linux. Has some sane configurationsfor i3 on top of Ubuntu.

https://regolith-linux.org/

dfischer
Wow that does look good. Why use Ubuntu? Wouldn’t it add a lot of cruft instead of just i3?
jeromescuggs
in my experience, if cruft is a major concern in your day-to-day use of linux, you probably already have a desktop/window management environment and theme you've settled on :P

i consider myself a sort of power-casual linux user, i don't develop professionally but love to tinker and play around with it, almost exclusively for aesthetic reasons. regolith being built on ubuntu means that the second i find myself out of my element, there's always the familiar and ever-present terminal i can pull up, that responds to all the commands i already know, has the binaries and services i am already familiar with, etc.

that being said, i've taken some light dips into the wild, mainly using manjaro architect to play around with manjaro/i3 - regolith was a very awesome(lol) way to learn i3wm because i wasn't simultaneously having to also learn the ins-and-outs of a non-debian-based operating system

dustinmr
Another Mac refugee to Linux here. I first installed a minimal Debian install, and you begin running into lots of things along these lines: https://cravencode.com/post/essentials/enable-tap-to-click-i...

And you need to configure i3br/polybar, amongst lots of other things.

I ended up on Regolith mostly to see how someone else who’s used i3 for a while sets things up. I’ve found I like it pretty well. It’s a nice middle ground. I may sometime go back to building my desktop from the bottom up, but Regolith has been a good way to get a working i3 setup to build from.

It’s also a very fast way to have i3 setup and use for a week to see if you like it. If you do, then you can build what you like. But if you start from building first, your initial time investment will be much greater.

clinta
To add to this, if you just use i3 you may miss some niceties from a full desktop environment. Fortunately it is easy to run xfce and replace the window manager with i3.
dfischer
What are some things you may miss? I think it may be perfect for me. I live in either the browser or terminal.
clinta
When I ran i3 without xfce if I wanted a battery monitor, I needed to find a daemon to do that. If I wanted an icon to adjust my volume, I had to find a daemon to do that. I wasn't getting notifications from apps because I forgot to install a notifications daemon. XFCE gives you all those things built in, and many more that can be easily added to the panel without having to go find another app.
ablekh
Be careful with changing X1E's BIOS settings (there have been reports of bricked machines) that you might want to configure graphics card(s) etc. for Linux. Hopefully, Gen2 is better in this sense (I have X1E Gen1, also with 64GB RAM :-), but "better safe than sorry". I would suggest you to review relevant Reddit forum (https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad), which has a lot of useful information (including some on Linux themes). Best of luck!
dfischer
Do anything to handle fan speeed and CPU throttle warning?
gradschool
Manjaro Linux, based on Arch, can give you a nice looking uniform dark theme without making you spend hours tweaking configuration files, and with what seems to be a well curated selection of icons and packages including development tools. It even gives you the option of a Compiz desktop environment if that's your thing.