6mo ago

Does anyone else use Regolith Desktop?

I used i3 for years on Ubuntu then discovered Regolith Desktop and haven't gone back. The thing is, I've never encountered anyone else who uses it.

16 comments

I like the project but use DIY Sway.
- I tried Sway and liked it. But I guess I spent too much time on Windows.. I'm back to KDE.
- Oh, never heard of that one!

is it more than a theme for i3?
- No, it's a blend of i3 and Gnome.
  
  Wdym by blend, like it's i3 but with all the gnome applications?

I like to use i3 in a desktop environment so I don't have to reinvent the wheel of sundry support details like hotkeys and monitor behavior, automounting USB drives.
I've used gnome flashback with i3, just like regolith, and decided to try using regolith to get the full curated environment but I found their obfuscation of what's going on impossible to deal with. Just working out how to change configuration was a huge pain in the ass and had to be done the regolith way.
But every new OS release with a new version of flashback etc. doesn't seem to work right, so I am contemplating giving up and just going direct window manager and accumulating all those sundry details of a DE manually.

I love both GNOME and automatic/dynamic tiling. So Regolith should have been a match made in heaven. However, unfortunately:
It's not found in the repositories of any major distro. You know it's messed up if it's not packaged as a nixpkg!
If you can look surpass that, it's still intended only on Debian/Ubuntu. While the AUR package exists (and even RebornOS -an Arch-derivative- offers it in their own repos), you're simply out of luck outside of that. So, as a Fedora enjoyer myself, this unfortunately applies to me as well.

I had it recommended to me by a colleague. And I've gotta say, it's fantastic.
Some nitpicks (when it comes to curved screens) , but otherwise it's pretty much flawless.

Tried it out a while ago, and found that I prefer GNOME's UX and configurable shortcuts better, and that two side-by-side applications on my laptop is the most "tiles" I would realistically want.

16 comments