I recently ran across SpiralLinux - GitHub page, and found the concept of how the maintainer is packaging it very cool.
The maintainer has been maintaining Gecko Linux for a while now - it has the same underlying concept.
The gist is - you're basically installing Debian, but with customizations that the maintainer(s) thought would be very helpful. Basically - better out of the box experience for new users, but also less work to do even for experienced users, and it comes with different download flavors - Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Mate, etc.
Bit more detail by the maintainer in this Reddit comment:
Exactly. It's like I went over to your house and installed and configured Debian on your computer, and then you kicked me out of your house as soon as I finished. ;-) The installed system no longer has any connection whatsoever with me or the SpiralLinux project, which is good because you wouldn't want your entire system to depend on a random single developer maintaining it.
(original Reddit comment has more details).
I thought this was pretty cool. I'm still trying to read up online on trying to find how the package lists are maintained, etc., and I might be interested in contributing if I'm able to in the future.
Just wanted to share!
Cool concept. I really appreciate the "independence" from the project after the installation. It would be cool, if the author preconfigured some less common DE/WM alongside the ones they package now. I yearn for a distro with a preconfigured tiling WM, so I wouldn't have to use my half broken i3wm setup.
SwayOS might be worth looking at. It is basically just an installation script for a pre-configured Sway setup.
Some things are pulled from GitHub, so it is probably a good idea to look into the packages it is downloading.
8 DEs aren't enough for you?
Also pop os has a preconfigured tiling window manager called pop shell
They are, but a man can dream. And thanks for the tip!
The PopOS tiling window manager sadly doesn't compare to a proper one.
What functionality are you missing?
Hi there, SpiralLinux creator here. I'm not opposed to adding more desktop environments as long as they are packaged for Debian, since the SpiralLinux project does not create or modify any packages. But I do try to make all the editions viable for "regular" people, so things like tiling window managers are probably outside of the scope of the project.
Anyway, I'm just spitballing. Good luck with your project!
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you like the project.
That's why I love Nix, moving my hyprland configuration from my laptop to my desktop was almost seamless. All my keybinds, wallpapers and applications were up and running with a couple of commands.
There are a couple of hardware specific configs for my laptop and desktop but once I split those out it's smooth sailing.
I have Nixos on a laptop, and have a love//hate relationship with it.
I love the customizability and declarative setup.
I hate the number of times I've sunk down rabbitholes trying to set specific things up on it.
The updates being done via switch are a bit inconvenient, but cool enough.
The fact that I can't customize everything, particularly on kde, is slightly sad.
All in all, I really like it, but wouldn't recommend it for my less technical friends, who I'd normally install Ubuntu for. This has gone up my list, close to Opensuse slowroll and Linux mint Debian edition now.
Yeah since using NIX for a couple of months now I moved away from KDE, you could customize KDE with home-manager however you would be writing out stacks of home.file lines as KDE is all over the shop when it comes to configuration. IIRC there is a module for KDE to help however it looked like a bigger time sink than I wanted.
For example my hyprpaper config is as such:
Same can be done for KDE's config however you'll run into issues changing settings manually from memory. I'm quite happy with hyprland as there are less moving parts compared to a complete package (gnome / kde), everything that's installed (probably) has a purpose for my use-case.
Regolith
I have my eye on Regolith. Sadly it seems to be only available on Ubuntu and its derivatives, because they rely on
apt.OpenSUSEway is pattern you can install in opensuse which install an opensuse themed sway/waybar/wofi/greetd and a notification center i cant recall its name. It is what I use on Opensuse Slowroll for a less agressive rolling release.