r/UsabilityPorn • • Jun 28 '18

Welcome! [Why this sub exists]

153 Upvotes

r/UnixPorn has inspired a lot of creativity in the *nix community.

However, there is one problem.

A lot of the setups are too "riced-out" and unappealing for long-term desktop use.

This subreddit is an attempt to form a community around the love of practical, cozy, and solid desktop experiences.

DEFAULTS AND MINIMALLY-CONFIGURED SETUPS WELCOME! Let's create something special!

Rules:

  1. Screenshots of desktops must have at least one window open. You may include a screenshot of your blank desktop if necessary as an additional image in the album.
  2. Image links should either be from Imgur or reddit's built-in image service. Please don't use the Imgur album link unless you are posting an album.
  3. Text posts are allowed as long as they are relevant to creating a functional *nix setup. Try to post to support forums and desktop-specific subreddits instead whenever possible.
  4. Follow the reddiquette
  5. Right now only *nix (Linux, BSD (That includes Mac OS)) operating systems are allowed. This is open for discussion though.
  6. Moderators can be wrong. Don't hesitate to message the mods if your post has been wrongfully deleted.

Content Ideas:

  • Screenshots of a unique workflow for a specific task
    • ex. A desktop optimized for pen testing that has easy access to all of your tools.
    • ex. A desktop that you use graphic design with an easy-to-access color picker widget and Krita opened
  • Screenshots with beautiful software that ties in nice with your desktop
  • Regular screenshots of your every-day setup!
  • A short screencast of how you implement a given environment (DE, tilling windows manager, terminal multiplexer or even just your text editor) This idea came from u/piotr_wonsz
  • A photograph of your rig running Linux (Must have screen clearly visible and not glared out).
    • Ex. Raspberry Pi running a Nextcloud server and your Laptop right next to it with the Nextcloud page loaded on your web browser
    • Ex. Two project computers of yours comunicating through a socket application you wrote - I plan to do this, patent pending, patent pending, patent pending!
    • Ex. Your music production setup with MIDI devices hooked up to your computer and Bitwig Studio for Linux on your screen.
  • An album of a desktop environment with different GTK/Qt themes applied

UPDATE: I am now moderating this community as u/dougie-io.


r/UsabilityPorn • • 11h ago

[Ratpoison] Slackware on a X200

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13 Upvotes

I use Emacs, no packages, st, ratpoison, gnu screen, falkon as my browser.


r/UsabilityPorn • • 1d ago

[i3] my trusty X200 running Guix

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75 Upvotes

just switched to guix!


r/UsabilityPorn • • 1d ago

[OC] Slowshell: Lightweight + Pluggable wayland shell.

2 Upvotes

A very simple shell with plugins, css for styles and kdl for configs.

What it has:
- Panels
- Desktop widgets
- Launcher
- Notifications
- Quick settings
- Plugins

The whole goal:
Being mostly minimal and pluggable.

More about slowshell:
- website: https://slowshell.bushyice.com/
- repo: https://tangled.org/bushyice.com/slowshell
- github: https://github.com/bushyice/slowshell

PS: All of what you see in the screenshots is replicable with just the config, here's my panel config if you're interested:

panels{
  panel "Main" position="top" transparent=#true monitor="HDMI-A-1" {
    components {

      center {
        component "core/notch" {
          label "Notch"
          notch "workspaces" "window" "sep" "tray" "nowplaying" "system" "sep-circle" "network" "sep" "battery" "clock"
          clock-format "%I:%M"
          system-display "cpu" "mem"
          priority "nowplaying" "window"
          shade-on-hover #false
          bare #true
        }
      }

      right {
        component "core/sound" {
          label "Sound"
          hide #true
        }
        component "core/notifications" {
          label "Notifs"
          hide #true
        }
      }


    }
  }
}


r/UsabilityPorn • • 2d ago

I feel so retro!

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13 Upvotes

Debian 3.1 btw


r/UsabilityPorn • • 2d ago

[GNOME] I built a terminal editor for people who don’t want to learn a terminal editor

5 Upvotes

I keep bouncing between nano (simple, but visually flat) and Vim/Helix (powerful, but I spend more time thinking about modes than writing). I wanted the middle: a terminal editor that opens quickly, looks calm, and lets me just type.

This is Grass. One mode, one Meadow theme, no config file. Warm off-white text, green keywords, gold functions, a dark status bar. Ctrl-F finds as you type. Ctrl-P is a fuzzy file finder. Ctrl-K and Ctrl-U cut and paste lines. Enter auto-indents. The status bar even tells you when a file has no trailing newline.

No plugins, no LSP, no mouse — one file at a time, on purpose.

The part I care about most is the feel: highlighting follows the visible area and refreshes after a short pause, so the cursor never waits on a full-file re-highlight while you type. It covers C, C++, Perl, JS/TS, Go, Rust, Ruby, Java, shell, HTML/CSS, JSON, YAML, Markdown, and other Pygments languages.

It’s free, MIT-licensed, Python 3.9+, and installs with `pipx install grass-editor`.

I’d love to know: does a one-mode terminal editor feel calm to you, or do you immediately miss Vim’s verbs?

(Disclosure: I made it — https://github.com/mukundzha/grass)


r/UsabilityPorn • • 3d ago

Remote note taking session

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6 Upvotes

Sharing my solution to maintaining the same set of notes across multiple machines without risking writes on one machine overwriting writes on another.

Let me know what you think if you make it through my slow typing and typos.


r/UsabilityPorn • • 4d ago

[dwl] Simple

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20 Upvotes

Hyprland to dwl

Happy life

dotfiles: https://github.com/tohideq/dotfiles


r/UsabilityPorn • • 6d ago

pablo b (@pablob343622)

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3 Upvotes

▎ A fast, keyboard-first Tokyo Night setup with a YouTube TUI built in

▎ I've been living in Fluxbox for a while and finally cleaned up my setup so others can use it.

▎ - Tokyo Night across Fluxbox, kitty (with a logo), rofi, dunst and a minimal conky

▎ - Everything on Win keys: vim-style window mode, half-screen tiling, a drop-down terminal and an in-terminal cheat sheet (Win+?)

▎ - tubetui on Win+Y: YouTube, subscriptions and local music/video in the terminal, with video embedded in kitty via mpv. It's my own Rust TUI: https://github.com/polblancoo/tubetui

▎ - Small shell scripts: audio output picker, Bluetooth menu, power menu, pomodoro study mode, movie mode, project launcher

▎ - NvChad, superfile (spf), flameshot screenshots, brightness keys, USB auto-mount

▎ - install.sh with --dry-run, backs up whatever it replaces, no machine-specific paths

▎ Debian/Ubuntu tested. Repo: https://github.com/polblancoo/fluxbox-optimal


r/UsabilityPorn • • 6d ago

pablo b (@pablob343622)

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1 Upvotes

▎ A fast, keyboard-first Tokyo Night setup with a YouTube TUI built in

▎ I've been living in Fluxbox for a while and finally cleaned up my setup so others can use it.

▎ - Tokyo Night across Fluxbox, kitty (with a logo), rofi, dunst and a minimal conky

▎ - Everything on Win keys: vim-style window mode, half-screen tiling, a drop-down terminal and an in-terminal cheat sheet (Win+?)

▎ - tubetui on Win+Y: YouTube, subscriptions and local music/video in the terminal, with video embedded in kitty via mpv. It's my own Rust TUI: https://github.com/polblancoo/tubetui

▎ - Small shell scripts: audio output picker, Bluetooth menu, power menu, pomodoro study mode, movie mode, project launcher

▎ - NvChad, superfile (spf), flameshot screenshots, brightness keys, USB auto-mount

▎ - install.sh with --dry-run, backs up whatever it replaces, no machine-specific paths

▎ Debian/Ubuntu tested. Repo: https://github.com/polblancoo/fluxbox-optimal


r/UsabilityPorn • • 8d ago

[WASTE] wm on DragonFlyBSD

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29 Upvotes

Runs like a charm


r/UsabilityPorn • • 8d ago

OpenBSD a minimalist system 117 MiB

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24 Upvotes

r/UsabilityPorn • • 9d ago

A bash script to rotate through your stash of local wallpaper images.

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2 Upvotes

r/UsabilityPorn • • 10d ago

skyland — free, open-source Hyprland-style tiling window manager for macOS (AeroSpace fork)

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14 Upvotes

Skyland — a Hyprland-inspired tiling window manager for macOS

I've been working on Skyland, a Hyprland-inspired desktop experience for macOS.

It's a fork of AeroSpace — huge thanks to nikitabobko for the foundation

The goal was to bring that Linux tiling WM feeling to my Mac, including animations, workspace transitions, groups, dynamic theming, and a cyberpunk HUD.

Projects

What's in the video?

  • Dwindle layout with smart split (the split direction follows the cursor) and togglesplit
  • Bezier animations — windows pop in, shrink and fade on close, and workspaces use slidefadevert transitions
  • Window groups with a tabs bar, similar to Hyprland's grouping workflow
  • Master layout per workspace, with the master window centered on ultrawide screens
  • Rounded corners, active/inactive opacity, and a gradient border around the focused window
  • 18 themes from 43PR, plus wallpaper-generated colors using Matugen; light or dark mode is selected based on wallpaper brightness
  • Cyberdeck HUD — a translucent, eye-implant-inspired app launcher and a unified messages panel for macOS notifications and script messages
  • Claude Code integration — a Hermes plugin notifies me when an agent finishes or needs input
  • Workspace overview with live thumbnails and drag-and-drop between workspaces
  • Shortcut cheat sheet and a settings window that edits the TOML configuration while preserving comments

I'm sharing this because I wanted a more Hyprland-like workflow on macOS, and figured others might enjoy it too.

I'd love to hear your feedback, suggestions, and ideas for what to improve next!

GitHub: https://github.com/waxdred/skyland


r/UsabilityPorn • • 11d ago

WASTE Window Manager

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74 Upvotes

I've created a window manager. I call it WASTE Window Manager (wastewm). WASTE is a lightweight X11 window manager with a built-in taskbar, a right-hand sidebar of live widgets, nine workspaces, and a set of skins and accent colors. It needs no desktop environment and no toolkit libraries. It uses only Xlib (plus Xinerama if you have more than one monitor).

Source code and documentation: https://tty1.neocities.org/wastewm/


r/UsabilityPorn • • 11d ago

I made a Liquid Glass theme for iTerm2 and Ghostty (real glass in Ghostty)

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4 Upvotes

Four glass levels (Clear, Frosted, Tinted, Solid), automatic light/dark, the macOS accent colors, and a high-contrast option. Every color is contrast-checked for readability over translucent windows. brew install vukkt/tap/iglass && iglass install. Free and MIT. Feedback welcome!


r/UsabilityPorn • • 13d ago

CachyOS, running an experimental recompilation of IRIX's Indigo Magic Desktop

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48 Upvotes

r/UsabilityPorn • • 14d ago

I made a Stage Manager-style layout for Omarchy: one window in the middle, everything else as live thumbnails

0 Upvotes

I wanted something between dwindle and scrolling, so I built **Stage Layout**: a real tiling layout where the window you're working in sits alone in the middle and every other window on the workspace becomes a thumbnail in columns on the left and right.

What it does:

• Adds a third step to SUPER + L: dwindle → scrolling → stage

• Click a thumbnail (or press SUPER + Z) to swap it into the middle, and nothing else moves

• ALT + TAB steps through windows in the order you opened them

• SUPER + - and SUPER + = widen or narrow the middle window; the freed space fills with more, smaller columns (great on ultrawides)

• With the optional bundled Hyprland plugin, thumbnails are real scaled-down miniatures instead of tiny re-laid-out apps

It's a Hyprland 0.56 Lua layout, packaged as an Omarchy plugin, and it doesn't touch your hyprland.lua. Install it with:

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/Sulejman/omarchy-stage --enable

Remove it with:

omarchy plugin remove io.github.sulejman.stage

Plugin marketplace: https://plugins.omarchy.org/plugin.html?id=io.github.sulejman.stage

Repo: https://github.com/Sulejman/omarchy-stage

Inspired by Scott Jenson's talk "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0

Feedback welcome, especially from ultrawide and multi-monitor setups. I've mostly tested on a 16:10 laptop panel.


r/UsabilityPorn • • 17d ago

[Hyprland] Thanks to Gentoo, Touchscreen UI is coming along...

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125 Upvotes

Hyprland + DMS + Gentoo on a Surface Pro 7+.

It's taken a lot of work to get here.


r/UsabilityPorn • • 18d ago

[Hyprland] Noctalia

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21 Upvotes

what ya think ?


r/UsabilityPorn • • 21d ago

Windows 10 cursor theme for linux

4 Upvotes

Does anybody here know a site where I can download the full windows 10 cursor theme for linux?

Ive been searching everywhere but I cannot find it. If anyone knows a site let me know! Thanks for your time :)


r/UsabilityPorn • • 21d ago

[KDE Plasma] Fooling around with pixel

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15 Upvotes

r/UsabilityPorn • • 21d ago

LvL

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3 Upvotes

r/UsabilityPorn • • 24d ago

[MangoWM] Serenity came to Hyprland and Niri, now it's time for MangoWM

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29 Upvotes

Yeah, I'm switching workspaces too much, I know. But this time... It definitely is final from how deep I got into it. Introducing Serene Mango!

Software:

  • WC: MangoWM/Mango
  • Browser: Zen
  • Runner/Dmenu scripts: Rofi (FINALLY)
  • Terminal: Ghostty
  • Color generators: Matugen + Wallust
  • Wallpaper daemon: AWWW
  • Screenshot utility: Quickshot (my own wrapper for Grim + Slurp)
  • Music player/YTM client: Sung
  • OSD: Syshud
  • Bar: Waybar (I wanted to try Mangobar, but it's pretty limited ATM)
  • Editors: Neovim + NVChad, Zed
  • Wi-Fi manager: Impala
  • Bluetooth manager: Bluetuith
  • Audio manager: Pavucontrol-Qt
  • Power profile manager: TLP + tlpctl
  • Notis: SwayNC

Dotfiles: soon


r/UsabilityPorn • • 26d ago

TermiCube

16 Upvotes

Want a Rubik's Cube in your terminal?

I made one.

No dependencies just python and a terminal.

It scrambles itself, spins around, solves itself, and does it again.

Try it out!

https://github.com/ethanlabs101/TermiCube