Welcome, weary traveler. I sense you have become frustrated with your distribution of choice, for incessantly reinventing the wheel, trying to adopt all the worst practices of Apple and Microsoft, providing poor documentation and/or really supporting only the most basic of setups. Fear not, for there are light-weigth, flexible, well-documented no-nonsense alternatives available.

A combination of Ubuntu nausea and a harddisk crash gave me the necessary kick in the ass to set up Arch Linux, SLiM and awesome yesterday. Rather than reiterate a bunch of commands and copy-pasteable configuration which would be obsolete in an Internet day, I'll point you to the documentation and some resulting user configuration:

My current configuration (Update: links removed, because I'm no longer using most of these):

  • GNOME Keyring Daemon, SLiM and XScreenSaver
  • awesome
  • xterm