 One of my favorite Linux distributions is Arco Linux. It's actually what I run on my main production machine. I love Arco Linux, love the installer, love all the various desktop environments and window managers that they offer. And recently Arco Linux had a new release and with this new release, they include another window manager offering. Now they also have a DWM edition and I love the DWM window manager. So I thought today I would take a quick first look at Arco Linux B with the DWM window manager. So let me switch over to the desktop here and I've loaded up a virtual machine here. This is Arco Linux B with DWM and when you boot into it for the first time, the live environment is actually the DWM window manager. This is the DWM panel here at the top and then you get your welcome screen here that allows you to do things like update the Arch Linux mirrors, run G-Parted. If you wanna go ahead and manually set up your partitions or just run the Calamari installer and that's what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run the Calamari installer. All right and we still have the welcome screen here in front. Can I just quit out of that? Yes, all right. And the Calamari installer in Arco Linux is quite a bit different than the installer and a lot of other distributions. You see all of these categories at the side. We're gonna go through a bunch more steps in Arco Linux's installer than many other Linux distributions is because you get to pick and choose exactly what programs you want installed and that's one of the best things about Arco Linux. That's why I heavily promote Arco Linux on the YouTube channel is because I just think the way they do this installer is really just ingenious. So the first thing I need to do is I need to select my language. American English is selected by default. That's okay for me. So I'll click next. The next thing we need to do is pick which kernel we wanna use. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna choose the standard Linux kernel without any Nvidia drivers because I won't need Nvidia drivers here in this VM. Also on my main production machine, I actually use an AMD card. So I actually don't need the Nvidia drivers. So that's what I would do. If you wanted to, you could pick the LTS kernel. You could pick the Harden kernel. There's a Zen kernel. So you've got several options here. So I'm gonna click next here. The next thing we need to do is communication software. So these are things like Discord, Remina, which is a remote desktop. Riot desktop, which has been renamed now. It's actually Element. That's a Matrix client. Now, for purposes of this VM, I don't need any of this. I see team viewers also in here. Zoom is in here. WhatsApp, Telegram teams. For now, I'm just gonna bypass all of that. I don't need any of that development. Now, this is where you would install things like your IDEs, things like Adam and Jeannie, plain text editors like Leafpad, Notepad QQ, which is a Notepad plus plus alternative. Sublime text is also here. I don't need any of these particular programs. I will install Notepad QQ just to make sure I have at least one plain text editor installed on the system. The next category is the office category. The most important thing for most people is gonna be LibreOffice. Do you want the LibreOffice suite or not? And if you do, do you want LibreOffice Fresh, which is kind of the unstable branch. It's got the latest releases. Or do you want LibreOffice Steel, which is more of a long-term support. It's the stable branch kind of branch of LibreOffice. For me, I'm gonna skip all of this because I don't need to install any of this in this VM. It's just gonna take up a lot of space. The multimedia category. Now, this is a rather large category, but this is where you would install all of your audio, video programs. So for me, if I was doing this on my actual main production machine, is what I would do is I would go in here and click on all the programs I need, like the Audacity Audio Editor, the Deadbeef Music Player, which I often use Kaden Live for my video editor. I use OBS, of course, to record my videos and stream my videos. I also like having VLC installed on the system. I like having MPV installed on the system. So I would probably install all of those. Now, since this is a VM, I'm actually not going to install most of this. I'll tick off the video editor, the audio editor and OBS, but I will leave VLC, MPV and Deadbeef to install. And probably the coolest thing about the ArcoLinux installer is the internet category because you get to pick and choose web browsers and email clients. And for me, wanting to stick to free and open source software, I'm gonna install Firefox. That's gonna be the one I would choose. If you wanted to choose something else, I mean other free and open source alternatives. You have Brave and Chromium. I see Kube browser down here. I really like Kube browser. Those of you that really don't care about free and open source software and you don't mind running something proprietary, Vivaldi is here. Opera is also here. I don't see Google Chrome. Yeah, there's Google Chrome for those of you that want that. For me though, I definitely want to go with free and open source Firefox. For theming, I really don't need anything here just to make sure I have some kind of theming going on. I will just tick on the adaptive GTK theme just to make sure I have at least one GTK theme. I'll go ahead and do the ARC icon theme just to make sure I have at least one icon theme installed on the system. For graphics, we have Blender, Darktable, Digicam and Krita. I actually don't need any of that. I wouldn't mind installing Gimp but it's not actually listed here. I'm not exactly sure why Gimp's not there. So let me click next. We'll go to the gaming category in this VM. I don't need any of this stuff. On my main production machine, I might install some of the free and open source games like Zanotic here. Love that particular game. Really nice free and open source first person shooter. But I will skip that for now. For terminals, I like using Alacrity. So I will install the Alacrity terminal and then click next. And then we have our file managers. For a graphical file manager, I usually install PC man FM. So I'll go ahead and install that. Do I need a terminal file manager like Midnight Commander or Ranger? Probably not. I'll just bypass that for now. For utilities, these are things like Bleachbit, which will kind of clean up your system's cache and clean up any orphan packages and things like that. You have terminal process viewers like Glances and Gtop and things like that. For me, do I really see anything here that I absolutely need? For purposes of this VM, I actually don't think I need any of this stuff. So I will just skip that. And lastly, we have applications category and we have that accessory subcategory. And for that, I think I probably do want nitrogen to set my wallpaper. We have some extra fonts we could install. I don't need any of that. We have password managers. I don't need any of that. We have the USB writer etcher. So you might want to tick that on if you need a program to burn ISOs, the images to USB sticks. And then of course you have some stuff regarding virtual box. So I'm just going to click next here. And finally, Arco Linux Dev. And this is software for Arco Linux developers and beta testers. I'm going to bypass that for now. Finally, we get to location America, Chicago. I'm in the central time zone in the US. So Chicago will work for me since that is the right time zone. For the keyboard, English US is correct. So I'm going to click next for partitioning. I'm going to do the automatic partitioning. So I'm just going to let Arco Linux have the entire 20 gig hard drive of this VM. So do we want to swap or not? I love that the fact that it asks you that, do you want to swap or do you not want to swap? I'm going to say swap to file. Then I'm going to click next. Now we need to create our username. I'm going to call my user DT. What is the name of this computer? I'm going to do DT-Arco. And for a password, let me do a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons. And then repeat that strong and complicated password. And then we need to decide, do we want to use that same password for the root account? That's fine because it's such a strong and complicated password that can be the password for the root user and my DT user. And I click next, we get a summary. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. The partition scheme looks good. I'm going to click install. And this portion of the installer is going to take a few minutes, depending on how much extra stuff you decided to install upfront. This process could take five, 10 minutes. It may take 20, 30 minutes. I don't know. But I didn't choose a whole lot of stuff. So I don't think this will take very long in my case, but I will pause the video until this portion of the installation has completed. And the installation has completed. And within the Calamari installer, you need to make sure that this box here is ticked on that says restart now. And then when you click done here at the bottom right, it will restart the machine for you. In my case, a virtual machine. Those of you doing this on a physical machine, what you need to do is after you click done, at some point, you need to unplug the USB stick that you're installing from. And that's what I'm going to do right now. I have rebooted and let me enter my password. And we should log into Arco Linux 20.11 with the DWM window manager. Let me click that off. I also no longer want to see this auto start screen. So let me quit that as well. Now let me do a super enter to bring up a terminal. All right. And then I'm going to run the following command just to get a proper screen resolution here. So I'm going to do a X render space dash S space. And then 1920 by 1080 to get a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. And then if I do super X, I believe to kill a window. Yes. Now super X brings up the screen lock or the session manager. So let me cancel that super to kill a window. All right. How about super shift R to restart DWM? Oh, it fixes the background, although it didn't fix the conky, but I can fix that as well. If I do super P, which is typically the default key binding in DWM and in X monad for bringing up D menu. And that does bring up D menu. Let me run a kill all conky to kill conky. Now let me do super shift R to restart DWM. And now we just have the one conky. Okay. This is the way it should look out of the box here. And I will say, you know, a nice wallpaper. I do like the fact that they have the conky here, even though it's probably not something you're going to use longterm. You're probably just going to want to get rid of that once you learn the key bindings. But first logging in, I think it's very important that you know, super shift enter opens your file manager, control alt V opens the Vivaldi web browser. Although that's not going to work for me, is it? Because I didn't install Vivaldi. Yeah. So they do have some stuff here in the conky that is dependent on whether you actually installed that stuff or not. For example, super F2 opens up the editor. Let me try that. Super F2 does not open up the editor because whatever editor that's supposed to be, I don't think I installed it because the only one I installed was notepad QQ. So I don't know what that's trying to call, but I don't have it. So that is one issue there is that some of the stuff in the conky, while that's nice that that's there, but it could throw people off. You know, I understand that I didn't install anything, but other people may actually think their machine is broken because some of those key bindings don't work. So that may be something that the ARCO team needs to try to address. Now that I know some of the basic key bindings, in DWM the default layout typically is a master and stack layout. So if I open a few terminals here, so I'm gonna do super enter a few times. And there's the first window, there is the second window, there is the third window, and there is a fourth window. It keeps opening the new window as the master and everything else gets pushed to the stack over here on the right. And it looks like it's a very default kind of DWM config because in DWM's master and stack layout, the master is actually like 55% of the screen rather than an exact 50-50. You can see how the master is just slightly bigger than the width of the stack. And typically I changed that, you know, I might make it an even 50-50, but that's just me. But let me see if I can actually find the config file for what they're using here. And I believe I actually did a search for this before doing this video because I wanted to make sure I could actually find this is that it is in dot config slash ARCO-DWM Let me CD into that particular directory. Let me zoom in if I can here so you guys can see this. And now that I am in dot config slash ARCO-DWM, let me do an LS and there is the source code. And let's do a VM config dot def dot H. And I just want to take a look at the code here to see how much patching they've done because by default DWM out of the box, you really do have to patch it quite a bit to make it sort of usable. It only comes with like two or three layouts installed by default out of the box. It also doesn't come with any kind of system information. It doesn't come with assist tray in the panel. It does come with a panel, oddly enough, being a suckless utility. You'd think it wouldn't come with a panel at all. It would make you go install a third-party panel. No, they actually do have a panel built in but that panel really doesn't have much to it. And just looking at some of what they've patched here, it looks like they did include some system tray stuff here, so I think they did patch it to have this system tray here. I've never actually patched DWM myself for system trays because I don't typically use them, but that's kind of neat that they added that. I think they patched it for some font stuff, too, because you have two font settings. You have this font setting here, which is just fonts. I think Notosands Mono size 11. That's just your font here and the DWM panel. So that's the DWM font setting, but then you have D menu font right below it. And I think that's the font for D menu. So if I super P to open up D menu, so the D menu font can be different than the DWM font. They do need to patch D menu though for line height. So by default, D menu has a fixed line height. The line height is dependent on the size of the font that you're using. And that can be an issue because you have a D menu that's not the same height as the panel that's behind it. And so you have this weird, just ugly effect where you can partially see the panel behind D menu, just patch D menu to allow you to set a line height. There's a line height patch that takes all of 30 seconds to patch it and it gives you an extra flag that you can set where you can specify that line height so that you can set it exactly to the point where it perfectly covers up the panel. And then we have some coloring information. These five colors here that are also down here. So this is foreground, background, border, and these colors are set in these here. And this is the coloring information in the panel, also the border color around the windows depending on the foreground, background, whether something's selected or not. Going a little further down, we get into some key binding information. And it does look like just like the standard default DWM, the only layouts we have are the standard master and stack, a floating layout and a monocle layout. So that's just the standard three layouts that come with DWM out of the box. And surprised they didn't patch that to include a few extra possibilities because there's a lot of different layouts you can have in DWM, even if you're not gonna have it enabled necessarily in the config, it would be nice if DWM was patched for it and maybe you had those lines commented out where the users could very easily turn off or turn on the layouts that they wanna use. And I'm gonna go into the key bindings here and just most of this looks like the standard key bindings for DWM I see that mod key plus T toggles layout zero, which I think is just the standard tiling layout, the master and stack layout. Let me open up a couple of windows here just so we can see this. So you do it LS dash LAH just to get something different on each screen. And this one I'm gonna cat out the bash RC just to have something different on each screen. So if I do super T, nothing is happening. If I do, what was the other key bindings here? Give me just a second. Yeah, I'm trying to read the key bindings here. I wanna move this window over to the master so I can actually read everything. I would assume super shift J and K. Now super J and K, just the mod key J and K move focus around the stack, super shift J and K should move the windows typically, it does not. And you know what, I know the problem here. Let me close these windows, the terminal windows. So this thing has not been patched at all. So one of the very first patches, almost everybody patches DWM for is a rotate stack patch. That's actually the name of the patch, rotate stack. Because by default, when you have a bunch of windows open, you cannot shift their position in the stack manually. Like you can't hit a key combination and make this window here in this position up here or over here, it doesn't come with that functionality. So I, you know what, we've looked at pretty much everything there is to look at here because the standard default DWM config is basically all I've shown you. It doesn't have any other layouts. There were three layouts, by the way, which was what I was trying to show you guys. If I hit super T, which didn't work before because that's the master and stack layout, we were already in it, super F as a full screen layout and super, is it M? It's the monocle layout, I believe. Maybe it was a different key binding, but if I do super T, that would get us back to the master and stack layout. Let me get rid of those windows. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in here. And let me clear the screen. Got the cap slots on, all right. And what I'm gonna do is because this is pretty much a vanilla DWM config and it's really not patched for all the functionality that you expect most titling window managers to have. I have my own build of DWM in the AUR, so I'm gonna do a yay, space dash capital S, DWM dash distro two, I'll just tab complete here and it should find that, yep. DWM dash distro two dash get. This is my own personal build of DWM that's patched for a bunch of extra layouts. It's patched for rotating the stack, the ability to change the stack and everything like that. It comes with a lot of extra functionality that you're probably gonna want. It looks like one of the requirements for my build is also the tabbed program. It's another subclass program, so I will go ahead and install that. There's also some fonts that are also requirements for my build, so let me go ahead and check out the diff if I wanted to, the package build, now that I've checked that out. You can actually read my package build here and if I go back up, can I scroll back up? You can see some of the dependencies for my build include the hack font, the joy pixels font. I also require ST, the menu and tabbed. The menu I know was already installed, ST might have already been installed as well. I have my own personal builds of all those though. So do I wanna proceed with this installation? Sure. And now I need to give it my root password and hit yes one more time. It's installing the fonts and then it should eventually get clone my DWM build because the source for it is over on my GitLab. But did the get clone and then it should do a pseudo make install and it's gonna throw all of that in the slash opt directory on the system. Did see a warning there, but it looks like it's gonna build correctly though. Says there was an error. So one of the problems was when you're building my build of DWM is it tries to overwrite the existing binary of DWM also the existing documentation for DWM, the license and the read me and all of that stuff is already there. So I need to remove these particular files that it's complaining about here. But what I need to do is as route, I need to sudo RM for remove and I'm gonna remove user bin DWM space. I'm also gonna remove the man page for DWM because it's gonna be a different man page for my build because it's gonna have different options. Then I'm gonna remove the X sessions DWM desktop file because my build is gonna have its own X sessions file and then let's remove those and then I'm gonna rerun yay dash capital S DWM dash distro tube dash get and it should build just fine now. So I'll skip reading the package build this time and it built correctly. And now all I need to do is I need to log out quit out of DWM and log back in. So if I do is it super shift Q to quit out of it a super shift Q quits an application to exit it's super X on the keyboard and then click log out. Then let me log back in and it's still the ARCO DWM. This is not my DWM. So for some reason I guess the DWM ARCO binary is still on the system. I'm not sure how we can overwrite that if we can. Let me CD into slash opt because that is where I put DWM dash distro tube. So let me CD into DWM dash distro tube dash get and do an LS and then from this directory I'm going to do a pseudo make clean install and it builds just fine super X to exit out. And then let me log back in. Okay, now this is my build of DWM. That's weird that I had to actually even after the installation physically go into the slash opt directory and find the source code for my build and actually do all of this. Now let me do super enter and that opens the ST terminal because my build of DWM actually has ST binded as the terminal rather than a Lackardy because I figure most people that use DWM are probably going to use ST rather than something like a Lackardy or termite. Let me quickly do an X render here one more time to get us a better screen resolution. If I can type it correctly, miss build. Got some letters out of order there. All right, super shift C for my key bindings closes a window and there is no wallpaper set. Let's run nitrogen and I will set a different wallpaper and that one looks good. So let's just go with that and let's do the skilled now super shift C and there's a nice bright wallpaper. Now the next thing I want to do is D menu. This is not my build of D menu. That's still what came with Arco. I have my own build of D menu to match my own build of DWM as well. So let me open up the menu. I'm gonna launch the Lackardy terminal just because the standard ST terminal doesn't look good. I have my own build of ST actually, but let me see if I can zoom in here. This time I'm gonna do yay dash capital S D menu dash distro tube and I'll tab complete dash get. All right, and then I'll go ahead and do my build of ST is also in the AUR, which is ST dash distro tube dash get. Go ahead and install both of those programs. And it's gonna say that my build of D menu conflicts with the existing build of D menu is gonna override it. That's fine. ST my build of ST is also gonna override the default ST which is fine too. Because by default, both the build of D menu and ST that are here are just the standard suckless builds. They're not patched in any way. And I definitely would rather have my builds rather than these builds. This looks like it's running the get clone because both my build of D menu and my build of ST also are on my get lab. So it pulls that down from my get lab. Then I have to give it a root password for it actually to install D menu dash distro tube dash get or in conflict. Do I actually wanna remove the regular D menu and you have to actually type why here because by default it's no if you just hit enter and then proceed with the installation. And ST is probably gonna complain about the same thing. And ask for confirmation in just a second. Yep. So ST dash distro tube dash get and the standard ST are in conflict. So remove ST why for yes hit enter then hit enter one more time. All right. And now when I do in my case super shift enter is my keep binding that is my D menu. And you can see how it matches the standard DWM. I've got some extra patching going on. I've got some extra coloring going on here. And I've got the numbers patch where it shows you the number of possible matches for what we're doing. And if I ran ST, you can see that this is a nicer build of ST than the one that just comes out of the box. So that is what you might consider doing. I'm glad Orco Linux has a DWM addition but the fact that it is very vanilla where my DWM of course, you know I'm gonna have some extra layouts and you know I can actually rotate the stack here. For example, if I did a LS here or LS-LAH here and if I did super shift J and K now I can actually move this window through the stack where you can't do that by default in DWM. It's crazy that that functionality is not built in to the window manager. I don't know why the suckless guys are so insistent that something so basic have to be added as a patch because I think that's one of the things that most people want is H top installed. I'm assuming it's probably installed out of the box. We should talk about system resource usage, 225 megs, right? 225 megs of RAM, so that's very, very lightweight as you would expect for a standalone window manager. But if you want a great minimal installation a great minimal installation of an arch-based distribution and you wanna start with DWM, a vanilla DWM and then maybe patch it yourself. I think Arco Linux with the DWM window manager makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure that's really the crowd they're going after because none of their other additions are so basic. None of their other additions, do you really have to patch to make them work? They're built of DWM. You have to patch to make it work. You're not gonna like that very plain vanilla DWM. Also the fact that they're vanilla demon you was kinda hideous looking as well. Didn't have an adjustable line height. The same thing with the ST terminal, that's nice that's there. You might wanna patch it. You might at least wanna patch it enough to where you can set a decent color scheme and maybe the right font size because by default the font size in ST is hideously small and it's just something I think they probably wanna address. But again, this was the very first edition of Arco Linux with DWM. I'm sure they're gonna address many issues going forward and I do applaud them on their work. They have something like 26 ISOs or something, something crazy over on Sourceforge. They have so many different desktop and window managers additions. It's actually mind-blowing. I have no idea how they manage all of that work but somehow they make it happen. Now before I go, I do need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Devin Fran Gabe, Corbinian Mitchell, Akami, Archvijay530, Chris, Chuck, Donnie, Dylan, George, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, PicVM, Scott, and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this first look at Arco Linux B with the DWM window manager would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names are seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community, if you'd like to support my work. Consider doing so. You'll find DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.