desktop

  1. software

This page documents, in a spirit of sharing known recipes, my current and older desktop setups. You can also read a narrative of the history behind all this an more in history.

  1. Current setup
  2. The GNOME exception
  3. Older setups

Current setup

I'm now using wayland with Sway, see the wayland page for the full documentation of the transition away from x11.

See also the documentation specific to firefox.

The GNOME exception

When I don't want to feel like an exotic little snowflake that spends hours needlessly configuring his desktop environment, I go back to the default, which is usually GNOME. I work with the following configuration:

I still have to figure out how to enable the nice shortcuts I have in my normal setup. In particular, I should bind the same keybindings to rofi. I found the keyboard navigation manual very useful to get familiar with the platform.

Finally, a big blocker is how to configure GPG agent so that it properly talks with my Yubikey, otherwise I can't talk to any SSH server. So far I figured out how to disable GNOME Keyring by doing this:

( cat /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop ; echo Hidden=true ) > ~/.config/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop

It disables the gnome-keyring startup routine. Then GPG-agent starts supervised, but doesn't show up in the environment, so we fail. Apparently, the following shell snippet is supposed to fix that problem:

# Needed for GPG2 to bridge with ssh-agent
#export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/gnupg/S.gpg-agent.ssh
#unset SSH_AGENT_PID
if [ "${gnupg_SSH_AUTH_SOCK_by:-0}" -ne $$ ]; then
    export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$(gpgconf --list-dirs agent-ssh-socket)"
fi

export GPG_TTY="$(tty)"

# So annoying to need to do this every time
gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye > /dev/null

This is all so weird and broken and confusing that I found about ten different guides trying to tell people how to do this kind of stuff:

Also: maybe try PaperWM to get tiling into GNOME.

Older setups

Created . Edited .