Where to start?
#1
Linux desktops are something of a mystery to me - the last time I ran a full time Linux desktop was in 2009ish, and I’m sure there are more interesting options available now, more variety and so on. If I recall correctly, it was an Ubuntu setup, but pretty vanilla. I don’t remember which release, sorry!

So, being incredibly lucky to get in on the first batch (yay!), I’d like to try and get ahead of things, and try out some different options in a VM before getting actual hardware. The command line is natural home, from a few years of running Linux servers, so minimal gui is appealing. I3 with x11 or sway on Wayland look like good options - but keeping hardware accelerated graphics available is a must (Chromium / OpenGL etc). I’m at zero on what the implications are here, or even how the stack itself looks, building it up from scratch. 

What are the options? Could any of you recommend a minimal build / distro to play with in a vm that might tick some of these boxes, that might be close to steps taken on actual pbp hardware? Thanks!

editing in some resources as I find them:

https://a3nm.net/blog/wayland.html - experience with wayland / sway (thanks @hmuller )
quote from @Luke :
> <lukasz> hmuller the little I tested wayland I must say performance was MUCH better than X11 on the RK3399. I cannot remember the reason why, but it was discarded as an option for the default build
#2
From what I've discerned most of the RockPro64 images either will work or are the basis for future images of the PBP. You can find them here: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPr...re_Release

DietPi is a popular lightweight distro, but I'd imagine most are already pretty lightweight given the platform. You can also check out Manjaro's image for the RockPro64, which offers a minimal variant: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-arm-...ased/99031
I'm sure with a little bit of work you could get i3 going on it, it should already be in the manjaro-arm repo, as it's provided with images for other boards. It seems there's also a bug in the 5.2 kernel that causes an increased boot time for these boards, but as mentioned on the post, upgrading to 5.3 should resolve it, or this may not even be a problem since you're using a VM.
#3
After  I show my wife the great desktop that Lukas and mrfixit? produced (Might have been ayufan, memory fuzzy after 2 Bourbons), I intend to get sway installed. Wayland after all is the direction going forward.

I currently use i3wm and really like it so sway is a natural choice.

With that said, the Wayland ecosystem isn't mature yet and a lot of applications you may want to use may require XWayland. As far as I know, there isn't a system set up to automatically start X if an application requires it then stops X when the application ends.

I will however be exploring this further after the DHL delivery =).


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