New Computer - Reprise
Following this post I’ve completed the setup with a new BenQ SW272U 27” PhotoVue 4k monitor.
It was a bit of a shock booting up. It is the first time I’ve used a 4k monitor. Very squinty! A narrow but perfectly formed taskbar at the base and a desktop with a lot of screen real estate.
I changed the DPI setting to 120 (from 96) and left the scaling options untouched. Perfect. The only change I’ve had to make is to the default zoom in Firefox - up to 110% to make the pages more readable. Everything else seems good and very very sharp.
The SW272U PhotoVue is targeted at photographers (the clue is in the name). It comes factory-calibrated with its own report. Unfortunately, to recalibrate it I need to run windows for the BenQ’s proprietary Palette Master Ultimate software... sigh. And invest in a calibrator. I’ll have to find a box and put windows on it when I need to recalibrate.
There has been no time yet for me to explore just how good it is, but I’m confident that it won’t disappoint.
Unexpectedly I am liking XFCE4 and Xfwm enough to continue using them, especially on this 4k monitor. Yes, I know I should be using Wayland with this setup...
The XFCE4 theme out of the box of the base install on Arch is fairly brutal visually, like something from the early noughties (which ironically does actually appeal to me) but I can see it being rejected as clunky and ‘old fashioned’ compared to baseline installs of something like Gnome or KDE or funky stuff like niri or Hyprland. The look and feel can be easily remedied. I’ve always been a fan of the Arc-Dark theme and Qogir is a modern iteration of Arc-Dark with theming for the DE, icons and cursor for an integrated desktop. I think Ubuntu. EndeavourOS and other distros use it (which may or may not be a recommendation depending on your POV).
It is also fairly easy to improve look and feel with custom css in the ~/.config/gtk-3.0 directory. I’ve changed the workspace switcher to look and behave in a more familiar way:
as well as changing the keybinds for tiling manager muscle memory.
Update:
Well xfce4 lasted for a week. I installed niri with DMS (DankMaterialShell) and it is a joy to use!
Update 2
Now using Noctalia instead of DMS - more elegant, more ‘minimal’, more configs to tinker with. More ‘minimal’ - hmm it is relative. Not minimal compared to their ‘suckless’ equivalents on the T480 (DWM) but that box is running Xorg with an ageing CPU and DWM is a good fit (and won’t run under Wayland).
Niri does trim a lot of the bloat in (eg) Gnome but the shells obviously add some of it back. However, they are weirdly seductive so I’ll play around with them for a bit since CPU, GPU and RAM are no limitation on this new box.
I hadn’t realised Xorg was over twenty years old! I can remember when it was the new kid on the block replacing Xfree86. FFS, you had to compose modelines from the command line to get graphics working - with the risk of magic smoke from the monitor vents if you fucked up. Linux was harder to use then!