Another Distro and WM Update

My most recent Linux distribution and Window Manager change was back in December when I landed on Debian Testing running OpenBox for my Window Manager.

I ran in to a couple of Debian update issues recently which required me to roll back to a prior kernel. Whilst I resolved that issue, I decided to look at some alternative distros and reconsider my use of WM.

I ran openSUSE Tumbleweed for a month-or-so. It was fine, but I had an issue with LightDM where I was unable to choose alternative WMs from the menu (OpenBox, Qtile, Xfce). I was stuck with OpenBox. Clearly I could disable LightDM and use startx, but it was less than ideal.

Because of that I looked for some alternative systems. I tried a couple of BSD systems–namely NetBSD and OpenBSD. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to install either successfully.

I then decided to return to a distro I have used in the past–Void. The installation went smoothly using the Xfce edition rather than base install.

I’m using a couple of old standard WMs - OpenBox and Qtile, but I’ve also installed a couple of others, namely herbstluftwm and dk.

Void takes a bit more setting up than some other distros. I need to manually start my sound system (pipewire), fiddle with the screen brightness, and install some packages to monitor for USB drives (using udiskie/udisks2), but I think I have a better grasp on what my system is running, and why. Void also uses runit rather than systemd so managing system services is a little more straightforward.