Regolith Linux 1.4
Jonni Bidwell has found his true calling: to bring tiling window managers
Regolith Linux has the goal of “reducing unnecessary clutter and ceremony” from the desktop. This piqued our interest because (a) frankly we can’t stand unnecessary pomp and ceremony and (b) Regolith uses the i3 window manager on top of Gnome. It’s a wild combination. Why? Tiling window managers, and i3 in particular, are hard to get to grips with.
You may have seen screenshots of hardcore Linux users’ desktops with translucent, titlebar-less terminals with razor-thin borders, the characteristic i3 status bar displaying tens of Emacs-ridden workspaces and stock prices, and Conky on the desktop displaying local weather and system resource usage. You can set all that up on any minimal Linux distro. However, it takes time and patience… lots of patience. And then, when you’ve got everything looking just right you’ll find that doing ‘normal’ desktop things, such as browsing the contents of a USB stick or connecting to a VPN, requires installation of comparatively bloated programs or libraries from KDE or Gnome.
It’s possible to do all those things from the terminal and script them to suit your workflow. But that’s not really satisfactory. Oh, and we haven’t even mentioned it’s quite hard to get one’s head around the tiling window philosophy, wherein even if a single window is open on the desktop, then it’s maximised, obscuring your personalitydefining desktop background. And then there’s the fact that everything is very much keyboard-driven, so new users will find themselves clicking and dragging hopelessly on things that don’t respond to clicks and drags. Stuff of nightmares.
Best of both worlds
Enter Regolith, which bundles i3-gaps (as we noted in our Pop review, having gaps between tiled windows makes things much less claustrophobic for beginners) together with just the bits of Gnome required to make the desktop usable to mere mortals, namely the Settings application, display manager and a friendly file manager. Regolith defies i3’s design of having the user set absolutely everything up by applying sane defaults and adding in i3xrocks for populating the aforementioned status bar. There’s also the Rofi applications menu and window switcher (which you summon with Super-space, there’s no button), which works much like Pop’s pop-up menu.
So it’s nice that Gnome’s GUI file manager and other core applications are there to offer some creature comforts. The distro fits into a tidy 1.2GB ISO and the initial install (which uses Casper to provide the same experience as Ubuntu) occupied the same. Behind the scenes it uses Gnome Flashback, the less CPU-taxing shell for Gnome. So this is ideal for more modest hardware. A floating menu provides a handy crib sheet for keyboard shortcuts (and there are a lot), and they’re all arranged into five cascading menus. You’ll want to hide this (Super-shift-?) because sooner or later, small and well-meaning though it is, it will get in your way.
Regolith’s look can be tweaked with varying granularity. At the high level, install a “look” to provide a uniform theme, or at the low level you can mess with configuration files for each component. And you have a choice of not one but three window compositors, opening up a whole world of transparency tweaking.
Let’s be straight. This isn’t going to be for everyone. There is excellent documentation and help is on hand through the community Slack channel. What Pop!_OS did was admirable, introducing tiling but still allowing users the crutch of using the mouse. But those rodent habits must be shed in order to fully embrace the tile style. And if you can manage that, then you might never look back. JONNI BIDWELL
Possibly the most gentle introduction to a real tiling window manager set up this side of the galactic portal.
“Behind the scenes it uses Gnome Flashback, the less CPU-taxing shell for Gnome. So this is ideal for more modest hardware.”