OrbitalMartian

32 Days of Debian - What Have I Been Doing?

📆 21 Oct 2025 22:40 UTC +01:00 📕 920 words ⏳ 7 min.
🏷️#Linux#2YearLinuxChallenge#Debian

It’s been 32 days since I installed Debian. I’ve had a lot of fun since I started with Debian, from settling on my new desktop environment choice to making a nice new i3 configuration. And this is what I’ll be talking about today.

Desktop Environment Choice

Since I began using Linux, my go-to desktop environment has been KDE, for if I want or need a full desktop experience. However since installing Debian, I have grown into using Gnome. I have tried both Gnome and KDE on my laptop and I have found that, while neither works particularly smoothly due to older hardware, Gnome has been running a lot quicker than KDE. I don’t often go into a full desktop environment, but it’s useful to have them for when needed.

New i3 Config

I have been using i3 for a good few years now, it was the first tiling window manager that I ever used. I have used pretty much all of them at some point over my years on Linux, but I have always had a small part of me that has always loved i3 and BSPWM. I decided to play with i3 for a while and so I have created a whole new configuration for this.

My setup as I write this blost is as below.

I am using Polybar for my bar. I could live without a bar and use bash scripts to show information in a notification triggered by a keybind, but I kinda want to have the information on hand at the top of my screen. Of course I can hide this by sending the focused window into fullscreen mode, but it might be that I create a keybind to hide the bar so I can multitask without a bar.

My Polybar has the following modules and layout. On the left side, I have the window title, could go without but it’s sometimes helpful being there. In the middle, I have my workspace indicator, it only shows the currently focused workspace and any workspaces with a window in; so for example, if I have a terminal in workspace 5 and a web browser in workspace 1, only 1 and 5 will show in my bar, very useful to quickly see where my windows are. And on the right, I have a Caps Lock indicator which only shows when caps lock is on, the volume indicator (which can also change my volume through clicking to mute and scrolling). The most important bits for me are the date and time which are also on the right. In the format of Tue, Oct 21 and 10:28 PM, nice and easy to read.

I am using Rofi as my launcher, a very simple, grey background with white text colour, and a blue accent colour to show the currently selected entry. I’m still working on my Rofi theme but at the moment it’s relatively simple.

I have got Dunst as my notification daemon, and at the moment, I haven’t done anything with the configuration for this.

I am also using picom as my compositor. I have only got a few changes to the default configuration, such as a fading animation, and rounded corners. I have also excluded a few apps from these aesthetics, such as Rofi which is managing it’s own rounded corners and doesn’t need to fade in. I haven’t played too much with this, but I am feeling like playing with the animation to make it more me.

And that’s my setup. I may go and play with BSPWM at some point, but i3 is my home for now and I am very much enjoying it.

Playing Around

I have also been doing the typical Orbital thing and been playing around with things that I probably shouldn’t. Such as installing KDE alongside Gnome, which usually causes problems (it didn’t surprisingly, but I uninstalled in anyway), and trying to compile Cosmic Beta from source which, surprisingly, has been going well it’s got to the penultimate compile step in the Rust compiler thingy, but it always locks up there, possibly because my laptop only has 4gb RAM and a Intel Celeron N3060 CPU so it might just be taking it’s time, I might put that on to build one morning and just leave it all day and see where it gets to.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Well, that’s about all I’ve been up to in the last 32 days of Debian. It’s been great so far, and I’m sure it’ll be great for the years to come. For those who have forgotten, or haven’t read previous blosts, I am doing a 2 year challenge of using Debian as my distro for daily use (I don’t use my laptop daily but I use it frequently enough that I felt like doing this challenge).

My next steps will be finishing off my configurations, and streamlining the existing ones into something that is very easy to understand and make changes to when required. Then I want to create an install script (for if I need to reinstall for whatever reason, or if I swap distro in the future (which is more a question of when not if). I am also toying with the idea of playing with other tiling window managers, so that may be something to come.

But… with all of this, that’s everything for today. I hope you enjoyed reading this and I’ll see you in the next one, soon (I hope). BYEEE!!!