A minimal Linux setup on Debian

sprout
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Tagged with guide and linux

I'm a big fan of Linux, and I'm especially fond of having a minimal system with no bloatware. I've distro-hopped a number of times trying to find the perfect distro for me, alternating between Debian and Arch a few times. I finally tried Debian Testing, and really liked the rolling release version of Debian.

To install a minimal Xfce desktop environment, I use a similar process to Craig Coonrad's guide, where I install Debian's stable branch, then update sources to use Debian Testing.

Note: 'Bookworm' was the stable branch of Debian and 'Trixie' was the testing branch when this note was originally written. It's since updated to be 'Trixie' and 'Forky', respectively. This shouldn't matter, even when it changes again, as in the next step we refer to the testing branch as 'testing' rather than using a codename for a specific release.

1. Install minimal Debian Testing

When installing Debian via the ISO, we will encounter a screen titled 'Software selection'. Here, we can select which desktop environment we prefer; I want Xfce, but the checkbox here will install a lot of additional software I don't want, so we should uncheck everything except 'standard system utilities'.

Once installation has finished, we will reboot into a shell environment.

Log in as a root user, then edit the sources.list file with,

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Now, update the file to include the following sources:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free-firmware non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security testing-security main contrib non-free-firmware non-free

Save and exit, then update the system with,

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Then reboot.

2. Install minimal Xfce

Rather than installing the standard xfce package, which installs a lot of additional utilities, we can install only the essential packages with:

sudo apt install libxfce4ui-utils thunar xfce4-appfinder xfce4-panel xfce4-session xfce4-settings xfce4-terminal xfconf xfdesktop4 xfwm4

Reboot, and we will be greeted with a LightDM login screen which will open up a working minimal Xfce desktop environment.

3. Connecting to the internet

There may still be a few essential utilities required to make things run smoothly, such as the Network Manager. Install with,

sudo apt install network-manager-gnome

This will require configuring. Edit the NetworkManager.conf file with,

sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

In this file, under the [ifupdown] section, amend the line from managed=false to managed=true. Save and exit this file and then restart the Network Manager with,

sudo service network-manager restart

4. Theming and adding custom CSS

I like to tweak Xfce to have a nice, clean, single panel.

A minimal Xfce desktop environment with a narrow, dark grey panel along the bottom. The background wallpaper features a still from the animated science fiction series 'Scavengers Reign'.

This can be achieved by modifying the panel properies and moving the items around. I use the Matcha GTK Theme to theme the desktop and Flat Remix for my icons.

We can add a small amount of CSS to adjust the panel spacing. Create a file called gtk.css in the ~/.config/gtk-3.0/ directory, and add the following CSS:

.tasklist button, #clock-button, #whiskermenu-button, #xfce4-notification-plugin, #xfce4-power-manager-plugin, #pulseaudio-button {
	border-radius: 0;
}

#whiskermenu-button {
  padding: 0 5px;
}

#xfce4-power-manager-plugin image {
  color: #ffffff;
  opacity: 1;
}

#pulseaudio-button image {
	-gtk-icon-transform: scale(0.9);
  color: #ffffff;
  opacity: 1;
}

#pulseaudio-button .recording-indicator {
  -gtk-icon-transform: scale(0.6);
  padding: 0 5px 0 0;
}

#xfce-panel-toggle-button {
  border-radius: 0;
  padding: 0 5px;
}

This removes rounded edges from buttons, scales some of the panel icons to make them feel more consistent, makes the semi-transparent icons opaque, and adds some spacing to make the buttons flow better next to each other.

To see these changes, we can restart the panel with the command,

xfce4-panel -r

5. Additional applications

These are some of the additional applications I always install; I keep bloat to a minimum by being very selective.

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