Customizing the Operating System

I just love tinkering with my devices, and have a design philosophy.

Sorry KDE,
"Nothing by default, just there when needed."

Which I know is not a perfect system because sometimes things get lost. And I have to search them which isn't very efficient. Since I have started from the drawbacks and pain points lets just continue with it.

1. Things get lost sometimes.
2. Moving the mouse can cause different panes to open.
3. There are only limited places to hide things.
4. Sometimes you just wish you could see things without having to do anything.

Now that we've got that out of the way, lets start with everything that I have set up:

So, by now you might have already realized what the theme for today is. Yes!, it's Extreme Minimalism.

Let's start from the bottom up:

Pre-Desktop

BIOS

Fortunately my BIOS boot animation is very pretty, and I love that the logo of my vendor also somewhat resembles Arch Linux. It's the new ASUS Zenbook Logo, which is located at /sys/firmware/acpi/bgrt/image on my system.

If you know how to extract the actual animation from the BIOS please tell me how, I want to make it into a plymouth boot animation.

This is the end result image after the BIOS animation completes and before it hands over control to the Bootloader.

Bootloader

I use systemd-boot which itself is super minimal. But, I have configured it to be invisible by setting the timeout to be 0.

It can be done by editing /boot/loader/loader.conf and setting timeout 0. Here comes the philosophy of keeping things hidden while still accessible. Because, holding shift while the system boots will let me see the Bootloader Entries if it is necessary.

I normally keep two kernels in case one breaks. Above image is only for reference to show how minimal the UI of systemd-boot is.

initramfs

Since I use the systemd ecosystem including the bootloader and init system. I have used mkinitcpio to build a systemd dependent initramfs. Hence I use the the Hook List table to set up mkinitcpio.

I also add plymouth to the hook in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:

HOOKS=(base systemd autodetect microcode modconf kms keyboard sd-vconsole block filesystems fsck plymouth)

Unified Kernel Image (UKI)

The default Arch Linux UKI has it's own splash image. And I don't like different things flashing when the system boots. So, I change the splash image of the Arch Linux UKI my BIOS image mentioned above. For that I edit /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset to have:

default_options="--splash /sys/firmware/acpi/bgrt/image"

Kernel cmdline

In order to supress the messages in the boot process I put the following arguments to /etc/kernel/cmdline:

loglevel=3 quiet splash

The log level and quiet arguments supress the messages while the splash enables the splash screen which will come into play when plymouth is installed.

Plymouth

It is a system that uses Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) to set the native resolution of the display as early as possible, then provides a splash screen leading all the way up to the login manager.

After installing plymouth through pacman, the default splash screen it uses is BGRT which stands for Boot Graphics Resource Table which also utilizes the spinner theme to put a spinner on the bottom of the splash screen.

The spinner theme the Arch Linux logo which I don't want there. So, I delete it from /usr/share/plymouth/themes/spinner/ and delete all animation and throbber images too just to make everything clean. The Arch Linux and spinners will be gone on the next boot.

GDM

I use Niri as my window manger of choice. But, have a fallback GNOME session since niri plays well with GNOME's set of utilities.

The default Arch Linux GDM has the Arch Linux logo there which I remove using the GDM Settings application. There might be a way to remove it via the command line but I am lazy and I just delete the application once I change this setting and it remains persistent. Tell me if you know the way. ;)

Poweroff and Reboot

I hate the annoying systemd wall messages when shutting down or rebooting the system:

Broadcast message from user@host (Thu 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC):

The system will power off now!

So I use this one liner from Kira-NT/disable-systemd-wall-messages to disable the wall messages:

curl -Ls https://github.com/Kira-NT/disable-systemd-wall-messages/blob/HEAD/install.sh?raw=true | sudo sh -s

And for the times I use terminal to reboot or power off I put the following shell alias for them:

alias reboot="reboot --no-wall"
alias poweroff="poweroff --no-wall"

Desktop

All that for the 10 to 20 seconds it takes to get from hitting the power button into my desktop.

But, now we are finally at the desktop.

Niri

As I have already mentioned, I use Niri as my desktop of choice. Lets start from then start then!

Wallpaper

awww is what I use to set the wallpaper since it has the ability to set wallpapers to different layers in niri. I start the daemon as follows:

awww-daemon -n wp-front &
awww-daemon -n wp-back &

The wp-front is the namespace for actual layer where niri's wallpaper will be set. The wp-back is the namespace for the layer behind the desktop where niri's overview backdrop will be set.

I set my wallpaper on wp-front and a blurred version of the same wallpaper on wp-back to get the above results. With the following setting on the niri config:

layer-rule {
    match namespace="wp-back"
    place-within-backdrop true
}

and the command to set:

awww img "$BLURRED_WALLPAPER" -n wp-back &
awww img "$SELECTED_WALLPAPER" -n wp-front &

Launcher

In the past I used to use very minimal and customizable launchers like rofi, wofi and tofi but after watching enough number of ads for the Raycast launcher, I fell in love with vicinae.

It just works! The only thing I changed was the fonts to be FantasqueSansM Nerd Font Propo, the Icon theme to Morewaita and enabled blur.

The Shell

I decided to write this blog post because of this shell. It gives me joy with a mix of pain and impostor syndrome to call it mine. I wrote it using AI in quickshell. One one hand, It'd had taken me weeks to completely write all this myself, but I did it in a single day, and it isn't system critical so I guess I get a pass for not doing it myself.

Lockscreen: I decided to recreate the swaylock-effects lockscreen with a blurred screen setup using quickshell.

I want to make the same UI for greetd and use it for the Display Manager too but, I am afraid GNOME will not like it when I use something other than GDM.

OSD: For OSD, I took design inspiration from the IOS dynamic island and decided to create an interactive bottom notch.

Bar: For the Bar, I took inspiration from the OSD and made it top notch.

Notifications: Similar to OSD and Bars I made the notifications with a corner swoop.

As a whole it looks like this:

Sorry for the flashbang.

Almost everything in the shell is quickshell now, which replaced various applications like:

• way-edges for bar
• swayosd for brightness and volume OSD
• battery-osd for battery notifications and OSD
• swaylock for lock screen
• swaync for notifications

This is Fun

Funny how describing the setup of the 10 second boot process took more words than describing the desktop. But, if we consider "A picture is worth a thousand words." the desktop wins by a long shot!

If you see some lag, it's because of the screen record. I have applied this "Nothing by default, just there when needed." philosophy everywhere from bootloader to shell (desktop),browser, editor and individual applications if possible. This is how I like it. Tell me if you like it.

Also please give me recommendations if you have any.

See you on the next one!