InstantOS

Vrai

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I happened to see a video on Youtube by "OldTechBloke" about "InstantOS".
This just may be the 'sample' which gets me 'hooked' on a tiling window manager :)
Looks very interesting. Based on Arch with a "hybrid" DWM window manager.
Am installing it in a VM right now but will probably install it on bare metal on my test box.
I like the look and feel of it very much.

InstantOS - A Linux Window Manager That Works Out Of The Box

 


On phone so excuse typo instantOs Vs Namib Vs Archman if somebody wanted to dip their toe into Arch? One pre-recquisit would be used Arch repo
 
It looks quite nice.
I’m not going to install the distro, but I’m tempted to try downloading and installing their instantwm from source and see how it runs!!
 
I'm not doing anything 'better', so I may toss it up as a VM and see where it falls.

It's still in beta, so it has no chance of becoming my daily driver.
 
Well, I've just cloned taken a quick look at the source code for instantWM - and it looks like it relies on having instantOS installed. Which is a shame. So there's currently no way of installing instantWM on it's own without installing instantOS in its entirety!

Regardless - I built, installed and ran the WM and it looks pretty good. Unfortunately - I couldn't get anything to work properly because again - it relies on instantOS being installed alongside it.

The keyboard hooks in instantWM run scripts that are part of the instantOS installation.
The external scripts allow the configurations to be customised without having to rebuild the wm - which makes perfect sense.

Whereas dwm uses hard-coded commands in the keybind section. So customising pre-existing commands in dwm requires you to edit config.h and rebuild and reinstall the wm.

So for now - I might just make my own personal fork of instantWM locally and turn it into a Frankenstein's monster of my own creation - mixing instantWM with my own heavily modded dwm config. Temporarily putting my own hard-coded keybinds into instantWM to provide some functionality so I can give it a fair test-drive.

And in the longer term - perhaps I should see which scripts I need to grab from the main instantOS repository in order to allow instantWM to be installed as a desktop on ANY distro. Which would mean you'd effectively get the functionality of instantOS, but you wouldn't be tied to Arch - you could use it on top of any other base.

Saying that - to do that, it seems I might also need to take a look at some of the other parts of their system. Like their menu and terminal - which are forks of dmenu and st...... Hmm, this is looking like more and more work! Ha ha!

Maybe I'll just stick with my own modded dwm, with the rest of my modded suckless tools?! Ha ha!
 

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