I3 wm in Fedora Silverblue

I have been using Fedora Workstation since a year now. I started by using the Gnome version then tried the KDE but didn’t like it. I have been using awesome wm and i3 for a few months now and have become accustomed the workflow. I read about Silverblue in a few blog posts and wanted to give it a try, but cannot figure out what would be the best way to install i3wm in it.

I know that I should layer i3 but what should I do about the other tools like feh, thunar file manager, etc. and how do I remove the other gnome packages from the core image. Basically I want to build a custom version of Silverblue with i3, the way we can do with Fedora Everything installs.

You cant remove the packages from the core image. You can however create a layer that removes the package by using rpm-ostree remove package. Since the only upside is that the packages are hidden it might not be worth the time.

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The easiest option is to simply overlay the packages that you need on top of Silverblue.

As Karl said, I won’t worry too much about the additional packages as removing them won’t give you much.

The hard option is to build and host your own variant from the instructions in Overview - workstation-ostree-config - Pagure.io

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@pr09eek I also started using Fedora Silverblue recently and wanted to use i3. With other Fedora versions, for ease of use, I always used GitHub - regolith-linux/i3-gnome-flashback: Support files for starting i3 in a GNOME-Flashback session to be able to use i3 but have GNOME services under the hood. Unfortunately, we can’t directly use that repository because it creates files in ‘/usr’.

Therefore I created GitHub - machadovilaca/fedora-silverblue-i3-gnome-flashback: Fedora Silverblue with i3 in GNOME-Flashback session, to somehow automate the process of installing i3 with a GNOME-Flashback session in Fedora Silverblue, if you want to take a look.

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Thanks man, This definitely helps a lot.

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