R10 Microwatt OS - Best Linux distro of 2016?

[bob]

What you think? for me, HELL YES.

LXDE was amazingly fast. not too bloated and you could tweak the hell out of it.
Then came Microwatt. WOW, need I say more?

I have tried a lot of distros, including a self built arch install, Manjaro, Lubuntu etc.

None of them can compete with WattOS - Microwatt R10 has made my usage of Linux a pretty much 24/7 thing!

Thank you, biff.

[biffster]

Thanks bob....we have our own warts, but so does every OS. I am glad its working for you. Part of the fun is getting under the hood a little to play, so I enjoy Linux because of that, and I always know what a Linux based OS is doing because of that vs some "other" OS's who want to hide away the things that its doing.

I used to spend countless days trying to make things "perfect" prior to a release, then I realized people did not really care about it being perfect as long as all the parts and pieces are there and make sense (and frankly did not notice), and likely were going to tinker with it anyway. So instead make something that did not have the bloat, but was as compatible as much as possible with most hardware and then go from there.

Have fun....biff

[Mike]

Agreed! Microwatt R10 is pretty awesome. One thing that triggered my OCD though was the space after the CPU %. I fixed this by removing the min width in i3blocks.conf. I also thought the perl script for CPU was a bit too much so made it a bash script instead:

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top -b -n2 -p 1 | fgrep "Cpu(s)" | tail -1 | awk -F'id,' -v prefix="$prefix" '{ split($1, vs, ","); v=vs[length(vs)]; sub("%", "", v); printf "%s%.1f%%\n", prefix, 100 - v }'
I'm currently playing around with using unicode font glyphs for icons in the bar. I'll post my config after I get it sorted.

[bob]

Nice one, Mike.

I wanted LXDE but I alslo wanted Biff's i3 config, so I installed WattOS 64bit LXDE, installed i3-wm, i3status, i3lock dmenu and i3blocks. booted the live Microwatt CD in a VM and copied over the i3 config and all was done.

[Mike]

Nice, Bob! That's definitely one way to do it. Now you have the best of both worlds. I was using WattOS but decided to make MicroWatt my primary OS.

[Dan]

Alright you two...you need to stop it with the microwatt worship. You're making it hard for me to resist installing it. 

[Mike]

C'mon Dan, you know you want to! 
Plus it teaches you how to navigate your OS via the command line more. That's what I like about it anyway. I'm more of a keyboard kind of guy so tiling WMs already check that box for me right out of the gate.

[bob]

Alright you two...you need to stop it with the microwatt worship. You're making it hard for me to resist installing it. 

Try it and I assure you, you will love it.

Simple windows key + k = kodi, etc etc. you get the idea. it's amazing! lightweight and fast. what more could we want??

[Dan]

C'mon Dan, you know you want to! 
Plus it teaches you how to navigate your OS via the command line more. That's what I like about it anyway. I'm more of a keyboard kind of guy so tiling WMs already check that box for me right out of the gate.

Try it and I assure you, you will love it.

Simple windows key + k = kodi, etc etc. you get the idea. it's amazing! lightweight and fast. what more could we want??

I can't take it anymore! I'm giving in...however...though I understand the basics of a tiling system, the idea of having to configure everything all over again on a fresh install is too much for me right now.

I could use Gnome Boxes, but I'm not a big fan of virtual machines...I want to see how it works on real hardware.

bob's idea of just adding it to LXDE is a great idea...but I'm finicky and like to keep my systems dedicated to only one DE. I no longer dual-boot or have multiple DEs on one machine any longer.

So...my only resort is to install it onto a USB and use it that way for now. If I like it like I think I will...then I'll replace LXDE.

...I'm downloading it now. 

[Dan]

OH...MY...GOODNESS! 

NOW I see why you guys are so whack-a-doodle over this! Microwatt is absolutely awesome! I've only been using it for like 10 minutes, and I'm blown away!

Never thought I'd give up "point and click", but this is so much faster! I'm absolutely an LXDE fan, and I hate to see the day that it dies...but this...THIS...just might be the ticket for me when that day comes...or before that day comes. 

I still have to get used to a few things, but so far, I'm REALLY liking this! Will I replace LXDE yet? Hmmm...let me play around a few days before I go that far...but it's looking like a distinct possibility. Thanks Biff...you're a stinkin' genius!...and thanks bob and Mike...without the two of you talking about it so much, I never would have even tried it.

I need to find out one basic thing...how in the world do you shut this down? I opened the terminal and typed shutdown...and that worked...with a one minute delay of course. I need to do some more investigating to find these shortcuts!

Now...if you'll excuse me, I have some Microwatting to do...

[Dan]

I need to find out one basic thing...how in the world do you shut this down?

Found it in the config file for i3. 

[Mike]

Yay! Another tiling wm convert lol.

Two important keybindings to remember that stumped me awhile back is $mod+h (horizontal) and $mod+v (vertical) change the direction that the windows split. My chromebook has a weird keyboard so I had to change the mod key to alt.

[Dan]

One question that makes me feel like a newcomer to Linux...

There would be times that I would like to have two full windows available; such as, in the case of a non-tiling WM, you can minimize one window to the panel. Then when you need it, just pull it up.

Since I'm new to i3, would this best be accomplished by having two (or more) workspaces; in which, one work-space has one full-screen application in use...then just swap work-spaces to get to the other full-screen application?

That's the only way that I can think to do it since this is all new to me.

[Mike]

I think like most things, there are many ways to accomplish the same thing. The two things that come to mind immediately:

1) Change your config so that each workspace has the name of an app. For example, "1: firefox", "2: files", "3: vlc", etc. Then set i3 to open those apps in their corresponding workspace only. This essentially makes the workspaces a window list.

2) Use a single workspace and open several apps in that workspace but use tabbed layout with mod+w. Now i3 acts more like a browser with tabs that you can click on or mod+arrow to each one.

[Dan]

Ahhh! Thanks Mike! For some reason, your answer made something click inside my head, and it opened my understanding more of just how much you can do with i3.