hswick / debian-joy

Notes and scripts for my personal debian desktop

Debian Joy Project

Project originated by Harley Swick, to make the usage, development of GNU/Linux and Free Software in general more joyful.

This idea of joy is heavily inspired by the Ruby philosophy of developer happiness.

djoy

Command line utility used to run the xfce_mod script. djoy will also store backups of the changed files. If the user decides to go back to the old changes before xfce, they can choose to do so.

It might be fun to expose some sub utilities that other projects may like.

Use of djoy would look like this:

sudo apt install debian-joy
djoy setup
djoy revert

swirl

To more generalize this concept, we could implement a tool called a swirl that can take a script or a command, and do what djoy does.

The swirl would be close to but not quite a blend.

People can share their swirls with others on the debian swirl site.

How does this project 'spark joy'?

It tries to only include, or at least emphasize, software that brings joy to me

Rust

• Rust is powerful and is the preferred way to make desktop apps
• Relm

Emacs

• emacs is my preferred editor
• mistydaytheme.el

Xfce

• Lightweight Desktop Environment that has a cute mouse as a logo
• Link for minimal XFCE install: https://git.devuan.org/dev1fanboy/Upgrade-Install-Devuan/wikis/minimal-xfce-install
• The default XFCE debian install includes a lot of software that isn't super necessary.

Papirus

• Flat Icon Theme

apt install papirus-icon-theme

Ion

• Ion Shell
• This is the RedoxOS shell. It is fast, and has a nice syntax.
• It brings me joy, and is part of the transition to more Rust in the OS, so I want to includ it.
• This may involve maintaining the ion-shell package for Debian (i.e. make the package, maybe use debcargo)

Window Manager

• Xfce comes with xfwm4
• Another option is way-cooler, which is written in Rust

Display Manager

• lightdm comes with the xfce4 install, and it is more consistent with xfce's theming.
• gdm looks good, but feels inconsistent with xfce since it uses the gnome-shell

Rust utils:

• exa
• bat

Dev

Development of Debian Joy is done on QEMU.

apt install qemu-utils

Create hard disk image:

qemu-img create debian-joy.img 16G

Might be able to get away with less.

We need 8G disk space since we are installing XFCE as well as other packages.

Download the current boot image:

wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso

Boot the image with:

qemu-system-x86_64 -hda debian-joy.img -cdrom debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso -boot d -m 3G

I recommend making a copy of the fresh image so you don't have to wait for the installation in case you want to do a hard reset:

cp debian-joy.img debian-joy.img.backup

Once the installation is complete we can boot the system with:

qemu-system-x86_64 -hda debian-joy.img -m 3G

xyz

Experimental DE for testing out ideas that might eventually go into xfce.

All applications would be written in Rust using the gtk library.

Goals:

• Support the xfce legacy
• Provide a testing ground for experimental ideas that could eventually go into xfce

• Use Rust to write all gtk applications
• Stop using the xfwm4 in place of a wayland friendly window manager

• Become a Debian Pure Blend, starts as a derivative

Ideas:

• xyz-dm - replace lightdm with a simple lockscreen written in Rust

• xyz-settings - port xfce4-settings to Rust (eventually migrate to Wayland)

• xfconf?

• cat logo - xfce has a mouse, so its only fitting to have a cat

• replace xfce4 terminal with kitty (since cat logo is great), or alacritty since its rust

• replace xfwm4 with i3

• port all xfce apps to rust gtk3