Moving (again) to Openbox
I have always had a soft spot for Gnome 3. This is why I kept going back to it despite occasional bad experiences with my limited hardware resources. I sometimes crave the fancy look and feel it provides. But I always end up going for something lightweight such as Openbox. Openbox is my go-to solution when I am desperate to maximize resources.
This time, after about a year of smooth sailing with Gnome with Ubuntu 18.04, I decided its time to make the move. I could not go for Lubuntu this time because it will come to the end of support cycle in April. I did not want to upgrade to 20.04 either. Nothing is broken in this system except for the bulky feel I get when I have 3 - 4 major applications running.
I decided to set up everything manually and install the bare minimum of things to get openbox going.
What is the best panel option I have? : First I was lead to believe that a thing called wbar would be sufficient. But it continued to crash abruptly and I was not in the mood to investigate into it. I gave it up and installed the fine panel named tint2.
tint2 is a unique panel. It is based on the principle of pure minimalism. The more I undertood this, the more I liked tint2. I added a couple of launchers to the launcher area and several other applications started to appear in the "notification area" near the clock, when I got them running. The basic look and feel of the themes given by default suited me well, even though I might modify them at a later time. There is also a gorgeous collection of tint2 themes here on Github.
tint2 configuration file is located at
~/.config/tint2/tint2rc
If you don't like editing this file in a text editor, you can always modify the settings using the GUI application named tint2conf
tint2 documentation : https://gitlab.com/o9000/tint2/-/wikis/home
Obenbox configurations are located at
~/.config/openbox/rc.xml
Again, you can use Obconf to configure it, if you prefer a GUI application.
I also use volumeicon-alsa. It simply provides an icon for tint2 to enable easy volume control.
Since I already had a complete Gnome system on the other side, some components were already taking care of some of the essential functions for me. For example, the startup programs I had configured on Gnome were still working even when I was on Openbox : NextCloud, Redshift, fcitx, a VPN client etc. I needed additional applications to run at startup such as volumeicon-alsa. I added them to the autostart file located at I realized that if I did a minimal install of Ubuntu and deployed Openbox on top of it I would have to add these applications to my autostart file, which is located at:
~/.config/openbox/autostart
This file currently starts three applications for me: tint2, volumeicon and clipit.