Just enough OS for EXWM

I've been debating it, but what all would be needed? Just xorg and some form of sound driver?

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Depends how smooth you want things to be. Example: do you want an ssh-agent or gpg-agent kicked off on login; do you want a screensaver or lockscreen? Do you want gtk theming for X applications? My `.xsession` fires: * compton * xsettingsd * polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 * mate-notification-daemon * package-update-indicator * nm-applet * lemonbar

Have you taken a look at GUIX? I just installed it last week and picked EXWM as the window manager. It doesn't come with much beyond the OS and Emacs.

For me yes, Emacs is my desktop environment, but a LispM underneath it's still needed and missed. Wrapping up unix is possible, not much comfortable tough and more important a GUI Emacs in buffers, something like Smalltalk (Pharo, for instance) widgets live in buffers would complete the game, it's a big arch change though...

If you use server-oriented Linux distribution (or really any that allows manual/minimal install - Debian, Arch, RedHat, etc) - just install "base" group which usually is a bare minimum viable OS - just enough to boot to terminal and connect to network. Once base is installed, install Emacs and it will automatically install whatever else is missing. It will get you to EXWM. But guess EXWM could not possibly be a final goal. You still will have to install bunch of stuff to actually use computer - git/compiler/make if you are developer. Browser. Some os CLI tools which are strictly not necessary for Emacs/EXWM, but useful if you actually need to do stuff done

I use Gentoo for this. You just need Xorg and Emacs essentially. If you need sound, Alsa does the job. I don't use network manager nor lemon bar or whatever. I just use ethernet and Emacs packages. If you use Doom Emacs, you should check out my EXWM module: https://github.com/LemonBreezes/.doom.d/tree/master/modules%2Fprivate%2Fexwm.

> lemonbar there are dozens of us!!!

Can someone make an OS based on Emacs with normal distro functions like browser, sound ,ssh , may be wifi etc and package it into an ISO please. Such a distro will be great to deploy in remote machines and low end hardware.

I made this thread because this is the exact plan actually.

I scoured the web for just this sort of thing. Thanks for providing it!

Looking out for your distro release. Best Wishes!

Yep I'm still planning what base to use for the distro not really wanting another arch spin.

I'm still new to this. From my limited knowledge, in docker hub base image section you can see that Arch Linux base image size is 122 MB whereas ALPINE Linux base is only 5 MB in size. Alpine is well documented and popular in docker diaspora. I'm still a Noob in this space. Good Luck dude 😎

Not much is *needed*, but quite a lot is nice to have. You can go through and add each feature you find you want, sometimes months later when you realize it's something you occasionally need, or you can just take an already-created desktop environment and swap in your window manager. E.g. I used [gnome-flashback](https://github.com/WJCFerguson/exwm-gnome-flashback) with Ubuntu 20.04. I'm always very unclear on what is gained by doing all this stuff yourself. It's *nice* to have things like volume buttons *just work* with an on-screen display, and not have to hook that up myself.

Because a lot of the nice defaults add other unwanted features and are impossible to change, so they can end up becoming more annoying than anything. Also a lot of linux desktop software is horribly unstable.

Any examples of unwanted, unchangeable features? I haven't hit that at all with gnome-flashback, but I have had a lot of miscellaneous features *just work*, like, say, rational monitor hotplugging just works, the `compose` key works, or finding that the pause key works when I had a non-visible browser window streaming music.