My setups

Here I document my setup through the years, from oldest to newest.

2016 - 2017

During this time I used Ubuntu, first with Unity, later with XFCE. No screenshot from this time have survived.

2018

dwm with custom patches, ranger, st, self-made background tile.

Early 2019

In 2019 I wrote my own X11 window manager, which I called antares. The code is no longer publically available. It was kinda bad and did nothing novel. But I had fun and learned a lot.

Mid 2019

I had worked some more on my window manager. The pictures above where the example pictures I had "staged" at the time.

I was particularly proud of the triple border thing. I still remeber how I did it: My WM was a so called "reparenting WM", which is an X11-ism where the window manager reparents windows from clients into its own clients. By giving the reparented window and the parent window a border and colouring the parent window itself, I achieved, in a midly miserable way, an interesting visual style.

Late 2019

My setup for most of 2019. Still my own WM, but I had removed its internal bar and replaced it with one of those that require an external status generator to pipe things into it. Writing that status generator I wasn't content with just executing a few shell commands every few seconds to get the information; I wanted it to update immediately when soemthing changes. I created a little C program that subscribed to events. That was when I learned about poll(), which was one of my greatest "aha"-moments regarding programming.

Looking at the music player, it's kinda funny I considered myself a metal-head back then, the goth signs were clearly visible.

2019 Wayland Experiments

I experimented a bit with wio^↗, a wayland server copying the UX of Plan9s rio, by Drew Devault^↗. I even landed a few patches in it.

2020

In 2020 I abandoned my own X11 window manager and moved to sway^↗.

Fun fact: the english subtitles for the demo video on the sway websites were contributed by me; I transscribed the video, another user on the sway IRC channel converted that into a format that could be squeezed into the video.

Note how my hostname in the picture is tarazed, while working on a project called wayve: Those are not related to my current projects using those names; I just sometimes reuse names I like when the original project didn't work out.

I was mildly Plan9-obsessed during this time, hence the terminal colour.

During this time I started working on lavalauncher. I remember it being quite painful to find fitting monochrome icons.

The rounded corners where not done in an image editor! I had written a weird little program called corny-corners, which added the screen corners as an overlay. It's code has been lost to time, but it was just a little layer-shell cairo thing. I still kinda like the look of those corners...

I designed that cursor theme myself. Might revisit it some time.

As the fetch program says, I used own a Librem13v3. It was a pretty bad laptop, all things considered. It had hadware based screen-freezing problems; the screen would, randomly, start slowly fading to grey, with a bright grey ring appearing around the outside. Kinda trippy. I returned it and got a replacement. Unfortunately, the screws on the replacement where stripped, so I had a very hard time opening it to install my drive. The screws where made from a soft, cheap material. I borrowed screws from a broken laptop I had lying around to replace them. Eventually the hinges ripped out of the screen. After that I switched to a librebooted thinkpad x200 until 2024-ish.