Setup the Cleanest Ubuntu Desktop Environment

I felt in the distro hopping. Many times. One of my concerns about Ubuntu was that you don't really choose what you install on your machine. They provide you with a ready-made environment, and that bothered me because there are so many flaws and applications that I didn't want. Especially since, I want to install i3wm and no other desktop on my machine. So here are some steps to have an Ubuntu 8gb installation with i3wm.

Guide

1. Install Ubuntu Server on your machine

2. Update the machine and upgrade it with

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

3. Install your favorite shell. (optional)

sudo apt install zsh

Change the default:

chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh

4. We’ll need a display server so let’s install the one most widely used; Xorg:

sudo apt install xinit

5. Adding a terminal emulator

I pesonally picked rxvt-unicode.

sudo apt install rxvt-unicode.

6. You can change your terminal colors, here is the command for rxvt (optional)

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/base16-templates/base16-xresources/master/xresources/base16-material-darker.Xresources >> ~/.Xresources

echo "URxvt.font: xft:DejaVuSansMono:size=10" >> ~/.Xresources

7. Install your favorite desktop manager

sudo apt install i3

8. Start X

startx

9. Load your .Xresources

sudo apt install x11-xserver-utils
xrdb -load ~/.Xresources

Bonus

I personally use proxmox. I'm gonna install rdp so I can access to my machine remotely:

sudo apt install xrdp -y
sudo adduser xrdp ssl-cert
sudo systemctl restart xrdp
sudo systemctl enable --now xrdp

Congrats 🎉