• [ ] Display manager (and why)
  • [ ] Greeter
• [ ] Window manager (i3-gaps)
  • [ ] picom config
  • [ ] i3 config
  • [ ] polybar
  • [ ] feh for backgrounds
  • [ ] tray icons
  • [ ] rofi
    • [ ] plugins / various modi
  • [ ] xsecurelock (and xss-lock) → link to Security
    • [ ] and why not i3lock / variants?
• [ ] Xorg config
  • [ ] Touchpad
  • [ ] Keyboard map
  • [ ] Switching tty (chvt, Ctrl+Alt+F2 &c.) for troubleshooting
• [x] Fonts
  • [x] Configuring fonts
• [ ] Theming
  • [ ] WM
  • [ ] gtk etc.
  • [ ] greeter
• [ ] Redshift (and its fickleness)

Display Manager

From the Arch Wiki:

A display manager, or login manager, is typically a graphical user interface that is displayed at the end of the boot process in place of the default shell. There are various implementations of display managers, just as there are various types of window managers and desktop environments. There is usually a certain amount of customization and themeability available with each one.

I use LightDM as my display manager as I wanted something which would support Wayland and X (even though I ended up giving up on Wayland pretty quickly), and that I could theme. I didn't want to have to manually start my X sessions etc. on login, and I wanted a nice greeter.

LightDM is started through Systemd and is simply enabled using systemctl enable lightdm. Window managers like i3 and i3-gaps should automatically install Desktop Entries in /usr/share/xsessions. If they do not, you will have to create them in order for the display manager to be able to offer it as an option automatically.

Other DMs

I experimented with Ly but found it had too many issues with the display — it was sitting in the same TTY as that in which the audit log was sending to stdout and so the UI just was a mess. I have not tried the other, more complete DMs as I really want something as light as possible.

Fonts

Default Fonts

I use TeX Gyre Heros (extra/tex-gyre-fonts) as my default sans-serif font, falling back on Inter (community/inter-font), Noto Sans, Libertinus Sans (aur/otf-libertinus), and Open Sans. I use JoyPixels (community/ttf-joypixels) as my default emoji font, falling back on Noto Color Emoji.

TeX Gyre Heros

Inter

Libertinus Sans

For serif fonts, I use TeX Gyre Bonum (extra/tex-gyre-fonts) as the default, falling back on Libertinus Serif (aur/otf-libertinus), and using JoyPixels as my default emoji font (community/ttf-joypixels).