I am looking for a distro with a customisable UI. I want the ability to change everything in the UI: like changing the window borders style, animated interface, creating transition animations. Something that can allow me to create UI from my favourite video games. I am even willing to learn a language if needed. Just don’t suggest arch because I’m only interested in visuals. I don’t want to spend time creating and troubleshooting other aspects of os. Also, if above requirements can be achieved with changing the desktop environment, please suggest that too. I am somewhat familiar with Linux as I used it a few years ago for some time. Back then, the games’ support was lacking, so I switched back. But now with steam os and proton’s contribution, games shouldn’t be a hassle to run.
Don’t pick a whole distro based on the UI. The distro choice is about stability vs bleeding edge packages, package manager, minimal/maximal installs, security hardening vs convenience, use or avoidance of particular systems (e.g. systemd), and things like that.
The UI will come from your choice of desktop environment, window manager, compositor, etc. Those can be installed on most distros. You can also look at dotfiles for more theming. Ofc it’s silly to install a different UI on a particular flavor/version/spin of a distro built for a given desktop environment (like Kubuntu), though it’s still possible.
I’m enjoying Niri rn. It’s a scrolling & tiling window manager. I have it running on opensuse.
Thanks for the insight. I don’t know what dotfile is, so I’ll definitely check it out. I’m starting to realise I’m probably expecting more than what might be possible for now.
Dotfiles are files whose name starts with a dot. Configuration files are called dotfiles because they used to start like that and litter your home directory. These days configuration files tend to live under the .config folder. The name has stuck though.
Linux is super configurable! You’ll just need to try out a bunch of different window managers, taskbars, etc to see which one you like best, but maybe look for some videos to preview a couple first.
The unixporn Lemmy community also has examples
Pretty sure KDE Plasma lets you change just about anything in the UI and has theme support.
You can get a customizable UI on any distro, it will depend on which desktop environment or compositor you choose. Though if you use a slow moving distro like debian it might be a while until you get newer stuff unless you are on the testing branch.
A desktop environment will include everything you need (bar, power menu, notifications, etc) and be configured to work. If you choose KDE, you will be able to customize a lot. Or there’s also Cosmic that’s still in alpha but will be out soon I hope, it allows for both floating windows and tiling windows, so you can try both and see which you prefer.
If you choose a compositor instead of a DE, it will draw your windows but will not do anything else, you will have to install and configure a bar, a notification daemon, etc, or you won’t have any. In that case you have several options :
- Wayfire : Floating windows compositor (like on Windows, or KDE and Gnome)
- Hyprland : Dynamic tiling compositor (the windows are automatically arranged in a grid)
- Sway : Manual tiling compositor (you decide where the windows go manually in a grid)
- Niri : Infinite scrolling compositor The difference is in how the windows are arranged. You can look at demos to see what they would look like. No option is inherently better, it’s a matter of personal preference. Personally I absolutely hate dynamic tiling, but I know a lot of people prefer it over manual tiling.
Didn’t know about compositors. It looks more promising than using DE. That you for all the links you provided.
TL:DR, Kubuntu or Fedora with KDE
Everyone will have their own opinions on this. Just speaking for overall desktop environments, KDE is my top pick. Pretty easy to pick up and change. Works well, feels like Windows but actually good and very customizable. And extensible.
As for the distro behind it, pick your poison. I think either Fedora or Ubuntu. KDE spin would be Kubuntu which is what I currently use. Both are pretty popular and supported well.
Some people dont really care for Ubuntu but coming from Fedora with KDE, its been a much smoother experience personally. Yes, I’m not a fan of snaps, but they can be turned off. In all, I’m using Linux, I’m much better off on Ubuntu than Windows privacy and security wise which are the main things I care about aside from being able to change whatever I god damn please.
I struggle less with shit not working on kubuntu. Fedora for the most part was very solid but there were more than a few times Steam for whatever reason gave me issues on Fedora. I’d consider steam a pretty easy thing to install and use but I had lots of issues with it just not starting or crashing, hanging when downloading updates. Really annoying.
Could be im just better at using linux now than I was back then as Fedora with KDE was my first real jump to Linux from Windows.
My last Linux installation was kubuntu with kde. It was customisable but not enough to my liking. I’ll give fedora a try too. After so many years, i should at least check how much it changed. Thanks for the detailed reply.
Anything to help a fellow Linux user my dude. I’m not as skilled as some of the other folks on here but I try when I can.
I think I saw someone mention hyperland which may be up your alley but you also mentioned you’d like to stay away from Arch so not sure if that’d work in this case.
KDE has changed quite a bit, you might like it better now. I think the recent changes have been good but I guess I dont change it as much as you might want.
I highly recommend Hyprland if you want a truly infinitely customizable UI. But, there’s a big learning curve to even using it, let alone installing it and setting it up.
You could use endeavourOS as your operating system, which is Arch based yet easy to install. I can’t speak to setting up Hyprland on other distros as I haven’t done it, but I’m sure if you look around you’ll find out what you need to know.
Thanks. I’ll look into hyprland. Is endeavour stable enough to use, as I only have a laptop as my main machine. So I want something that don’t need fixing every now and then.
Install your software from official repositories and flatpak and you shouldnt have any issues. My latest install has been going strong for about 6 months without issue. Linux in general is quite stable unless you’re mucking about with things you don’t understand, and if you do like to live dangerously in that regard, it’s a great way to learn a lot.
If you’re worried about stability, keep good backups. Back up your important personal files, as well as your config files so you can reapply any customizations you had in place.
If anything happens that’s too tedious to troubleshoot, reinstall, it takes like 20 minutes tops and gets you back to square one.
You could also use time shift to create system snapshots.
Sounds promising. I’ll try it if it’s that stable. Thank you for the answers.
I also use EndeavourOS. Look into btrfs snapshots, it’s easy to set up and use. It rolls back your filesystem to an earlier state.
It has saved me 3 times thus far.
If you want to get into customizing UIs hard, something the likes of this
You could get started with window managers (very opiniated topic, its really up to you to decide on which you should use) and UI toolkits like
Also I know X11 is slowly dying but AwesomeWM fits your bill really nicely.
TL,DR: You want a cool UI? look at unixporn’s top posts of all time, research an option you find good enough and go bananas on everything you need to make yourself at home.
ALSO consider posting at [email protected] so we can marvel at your fine grained setup, good luck!
Those are some great resources to study. Thanks.
The truth is that none will allow you what you have in your mind exactly, unless you get down dirty and start programming it. However, some DEs are more customizable than others, e.g. KDE is more customizable than Gnome, for example.
That seem to be the case as I can’t find anything that allows me to change the window border shapes. I’ll have to look even deeper.
I think XFce supports quite a few themes for the window manager that completely changes how the window borders look like.
linux distributions generally don’t develop ‘their’ ui and all distributions worth using generally provide a large number of compositors, wms, or des to choose from.
essentially you just need to find a reasonable linux distribution based on repositories and package managers and set up the ui elements as you like. sddm and plasma are a reasonable starting point
while some people claim that arch is more difficult to use or requires additional troubleshooting, it is really very similar to the vast majority of other distros, especially if youre looking into in-depth customization of the desktop. arch and fedora have excellent package managers and expansive repositories. opensuse and ubuntu are also fine.
Good to know but it still feel a bit daunting to just jump straight to arch like going directly to final boss after chapter 1. Though I’ll try it once I have a spare machine.
That will depend on the desktop environment you choose, not the distro itself, as you can mostly get the same results in any distro. For instance, idk if you saw pewdiepie’s video, but he was able to create a really cool and fully customized desktop using I think it was Linux Mint or something super basic like that and with very little prior knowledge. You could probably install arch which is now easier thanks to the guided installer and then copy the hyprland configuration from some post in linux porn or somewhere like that as a starting point. Counter intuitively, I found arch easier to use than something more stable like debian because the packages are almost always updated enough to just work, whereas working with older versions can come with compatibility problems, and you don’t really need to use external repos aside from aur. Also the arch wiki rocks
Beginning is always Fedora.
Don’t fuck with Immutable anything.
Don’t let anyone convince you that Ubuntu and Snap isn’t bad.
Just try Fedora. Skip all the bullshit.
Honestly Fedora is not all nice and sunshine… I would suggest Opensuse Tumbleweed over Fedora anytime nowadays.
I’ve used ubuntu. So am familiar with it. Will take a look into fedora if it satisfies my needs.
I’m not sure what “don’t fuck with immutable anything” means, but distros built with rpm-ostree (like all the Fedora immutable distros) make it easy to switch distros. You can switch from Silverblue (Gnome) to Kinoite (KDE), to Bazzite for gaming, to Aurora for development, to a growing list of other distros with a single command. And it’s not just Fedora distros either. You can try a lot without committing.
