Hello,

I advise you to select a WM based on Wayland because it now reached a sufficient maturity and Xorg can safely be remembered as historical. I personally use sway which is an implementation of i3wm for wayland. You will have an experience similar to what appears in your screenshot.

There are a lot of status bars for sway. I am using swaybar with i3status for the status_command. Don’t hesitate to check the alternatives, they are amazing.

All the configuration of sway happens in a config file and you can setup your keyboard preference inside. You can setup multiple layouts at the same time and specify which key binding to switch between them.

If you decide to give NixOS another try (which it deserves), the nixos config already has options to enable sway.

For the package manager, either stick with the one integrated in the distribution you choose (apt, pacman, dnf, …) or indeed use nix on top if you like the experience and its benefits.

And as a general advise, don’t hesitate to first try your choices in a VM installation, and take your time to check if it really suits your need.

Have fun

I can recommend Arch because their Wiki made it very easy for me to solve all my issues more or less on my own. Personally I am interested in trying VanillaOS 2.0 soon.

Well, i can’t really recommend a specific combination, but I can give you options so you can comprehend more about by researching. All the distros I will list here have dedicated editions, or ways to install different desktop environments. As of judging by your screenshot, it seems like you’re somewhat of a technical user so these recommendations were made by keeping this in mind, these are not the greatest options if you want something for a newbie non-tech savy Linux user.

• Fedora - exceptionally stable and quite fast distribution, altrought not the fastest, great software availability, if you don’t find your software, or the version shipped by fedora on the repos isnt working for you, consider install it using containers, like flatpak, or distrobox.

• Arch Linux - very tecnicial distribution, on my experience not really stable and not very usable on the longterm, but works well for a Great amount of people, it’s main features are it’s customizability, being able to craft your own system by deciding precisely what will compose it, and the aur(arch user repository), in it, you will find user made scripts to install all kinds software, even pathed ones.

• EndeavourOS - Arch’s youngest daughter, arch but a bit more polished, and user friendly, with it you get all the features of arch Linux, with better setuo, and more ease of install your desktop environment / window manager, at the expense of worsened customization.

• Opensuse - not very popular, but by far the fastest distro on the list, its main edition is based on the plasma desktop environment, you may run into some issues, but if you know your way around things, you will surely get the most out of this system, just like fedora, if you don’t find, or the software on the repositories isn’t working for you, you can always use containers.

Desktop environments / window managers - if you don’t know what these are, I recommend you do a more indeph research about them, but in resume, both are the user interfaces which run on top of your system, the difference is that desktop environments tend to be more user friendly and “complete” than window managers, while window managers tend to be more lightweight, simpler, and customizable.

• KDE plasma environment - excellent and fast desktop environment, has a great implementation of the keyboard shortcuts, you can make anything do anything just by changing them on the settings app, the glimpse of desktop customization on Linux, it has a lot of themes available and a built in theme “store” integrated right into the desktop. Recommended if you want a great balance between customizability and convenience.

• Sway - sway is a window manager for Linux based on the Wayland protocol, being the first of it’s kind, can be heavily customized using it’s configuration files, in which have a simple and comprehensive syntax, just like any other window manager, it can be configured to do pretty much anything.

• Hyprland - I would sway hyprland is a successor to sway, it’s more polished than sway with more features, has beautiful and fluid animations, I have never used hyperland myself, but for what I have seen, it’s the best window manager out there.

I can absolutely recommend hyprland to you, tiling compositor with animations you likely know from macOS, lots of configurability and a good example of using it with nix (NixOS might be a good choice here) https://github.com/fufexan/dotfiles

Also quite a nice discord server or matrix if you have questions about it.

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!