It looks very interesting!

But I don’t see the unique selling point of it compared to alacritty and kitty, besides web-enabled. Is there anything that it does better than these 2?

That looks promising, especially since my current status bar is also just a collection of shell scripts, so that might be easier to switch

Thanks! That looks exactly like what I was looking for. I hope it works as promising as it looks :)

Thanks, that was a very interesting read!

I forgot one essential tool, where I need a recommendation for: spotlight. I use it to switch quickly between applications or to folders. Keyboard shortcut, first letter of the application name and enter… I know there are solutions, but I only heard from Ubuntu, which I don’t want. Anything simple and fast you can recommend?

Thank you everyone for all your suggestions! I’ll quickly try to summarize them for myself. So what you suggest is:

Operating Systems:

• NixOs
• Debian 12
• ElementaryOS
• mint
• PopOs
• EndevourOS
• Fedora
• arch
• Opensuse
• Novara

Tiling Window Manager:

Recomended to use something based on wayland.

• hyprland (can be configured from file, good compatibility with nix)
• sway (proposed with Debian, multiple suggestions, config via file as well, good for custom keybindings, already options for sway in nixos)
• i3
• bspwm
• KDE Plasma
• dwm / dwl

Status Bar:

• swaybar (in case of using sway)
• waybar (when using wayland)
• eww
• ags
• KDE neon

Package Managers:

• flatpack
• brew (is this already stable enough?)
• Nix (obvious choice if nix os chosen)
• snap
• (pacman if arch)
• integrated one

Packages:

• together with wayland alacritty or kitty
• foot
• Yakuake
• suckless

At the moment I am trying to avoid anything where RedHat is involved. Not because of the recent controversy, but simply IBM is known to kill their software solutions on a whim. (although i still use ansible), so Fedora is unfortunately out (again, no judging on how great it is). I’ve been quite interested in EndevourOS, so that might be fun to try out. Debian for the desktop probably not right now. I’m running it on servers for stability, but for a desktop environment, i prefer having more recent packages (e.g. neovim). The “sales pitch” for Mint sounded pretty interesting as well. However i’ll give NixOs a try first, simply because it was mentioned very often, same with sway.

Based on this i’ll try out these combinations first:

1. NixOs with sway and eww
2. NixOs with hyprland and waybar
3. NixOs with dwl and ?

If this does not satisfy, i’ll look into endevourOS and mint, but that might require some Ansible I assume.

Thank you very much!

It might have. I’ve tried nixos on a mini PC meant as a home server, so most configuration is done via SSH and users don’t change (much), I might have accidently activate it while trying nixos out.

Making users unable to login is a bit of an odd (side?) Effect, but maybe I’m not understanding the purpose of this option correctly. I’ll stay away from it for now :D

Can you recommend some devices? Most of the ones i saw had good prices, but not performance relative to power usage. The N100 with its 4 efficiency cores is actually quite good for the price and power usage. Unfortunately most mini pcs with it have limited ports.

I also think, that 2 ssds might be sufficient for the beginning. I’m even thinking of just adding 2 external ssd’s and call it a day for the beginning (one as backup), but that does not scale well.

The jbod idea sounds good to explore further, as it tha home server and storage would be separated. However it would add an additional device to the power bill.

However i don’t need the full amount of all disks at all times. If i’d want to unplug via shell script, i’d need to plug it manually in person back in for storing things. I actually do not need it running all the time, as the home server ssd can cache most of what i need recently in access. The jbod is then more an archive.

i’m mainly looking for a way to power down the inexpensive hdd’s. I could use the raspberry pi as the jbod controller, but it does not properly support wake on lan, so thats also not an option