I can recommend Arch because their Wiki made it very easy for me to solve all my issues more or less on my own. Personally I am interested in trying VanillaOS 2.0 soon.

Well, i can’t really recommend a specific combination, but I can give you options so you can comprehend more about by researching. All the distros I will list here have dedicated editions, or ways to install different desktop environments. As of judging by your screenshot, it seems like you’re somewhat of a technical user so these recommendations were made by keeping this in mind, these are not the greatest options if you want something for a newbie non-tech savy Linux user.

• Fedora - exceptionally stable and quite fast distribution, altrought not the fastest, great software availability, if you don’t find your software, or the version shipped by fedora on the repos isnt working for you, consider install it using containers, like flatpak, or distrobox.

• Arch Linux - very tecnicial distribution, on my experience not really stable and not very usable on the longterm, but works well for a Great amount of people, it’s main features are it’s customizability, being able to craft your own system by deciding precisely what will compose it, and the aur(arch user repository), in it, you will find user made scripts to install all kinds software, even pathed ones.

• EndeavourOS - Arch’s youngest daughter, arch but a bit more polished, and user friendly, with it you get all the features of arch Linux, with better setuo, and more ease of install your desktop environment / window manager, at the expense of worsened customization.

• Opensuse - not very popular, but by far the fastest distro on the list, its main edition is based on the plasma desktop environment, you may run into some issues, but if you know your way around things, you will surely get the most out of this system, just like fedora, if you don’t find, or the software on the repositories isn’t working for you, you can always use containers.

Desktop environments / window managers - if you don’t know what these are, I recommend you do a more indeph research about them, but in resume, both are the user interfaces which run on top of your system, the difference is that desktop environments tend to be more user friendly and “complete” than window managers, while window managers tend to be more lightweight, simpler, and customizable.

• KDE plasma environment - excellent and fast desktop environment, has a great implementation of the keyboard shortcuts, you can make anything do anything just by changing them on the settings app, the glimpse of desktop customization on Linux, it has a lot of themes available and a built in theme “store” integrated right into the desktop. Recommended if you want a great balance between customizability and convenience.

• Sway - sway is a window manager for Linux based on the Wayland protocol, being the first of it’s kind, can be heavily customized using it’s configuration files, in which have a simple and comprehensive syntax, just like any other window manager, it can be configured to do pretty much anything.

• Hyprland - I would sway hyprland is a successor to sway, it’s more polished than sway with more features, has beautiful and fluid animations, I have never used hyperland myself, but for what I have seen, it’s the best window manager out there.

I can absolutely recommend hyprland to you, tiling compositor with animations you likely know from macOS, lots of configurability and a good example of using it with nix (NixOS might be a good choice here) https://github.com/fufexan/dotfiles

Also quite a nice discord server or matrix if you have questions about it.

• a minimal, fast system

• keyboard / shortcut based - all interactions can be done from keyboard (within common sense limits)
• all keys can be custom mapped (i have muscle memory of my custom keys for certain actions, so i’d like to keep them)
• all can be configured from dotfiles (worse case shell scripts and ansible)
• very low ressource consumption, snappy system with no delay

I’d recommend Debian 12/testing/sid with the Sway compositor. Homebrew, Nix and Guix can all be installed on top of any GNU/Linux distribution to provide containerized packages. Flatpak can be used to obtain the latest version of graphical applications as well. Terminals like alacritty and kitty are Wayland natives and Foot is widely considered to be the most minimal “default” terminal for Wayland compositors. You can use Sway’s built in “swaybar” or status bars like Waybar and eww. Sway configuration is just like i3 where you can configure specific devices like keyboards and monitors from a single file.

I daily drive NixOS on a gaming PC and work laptop, works great for both and haven’t encountered that password issue you mentioned

ElementaryOS, mint and pop are good starter ones and elementary looks a lot like Mac’s interface

For desktop environments the ones I know well that have the top bar, GNOME has one by default but don’t think it’s very configurable, Pantheon looks a lot like the Mac UI and I think you can technically edit the html behind it? KDE is definitely the one people use for maximum customisability and you can create a top bar with that pretty easily

As for capabilities, most distros will do most things, they’re all pretty much the same under the hood and all run the same software depending on package manager

Package managers generally come with the distro and I think that’s usually the thing that makes people’s minds. I’ve not used brew but most package managers will be something like

Snap (most distros): “snap install firefox” Apt (Ubuntu based distros): “apt-get install firefox” Pacman (arch based distros): “pacman -S firefox”

Apologies if I got any details/syntax for any of this wrong am doing this off the top of my head and am rather tired

Thank you everyone for all your suggestions! I’ll quickly try to summarize them for myself. So what you suggest is:

Operating Systems:

• NixOs
• Debian 12
• ElementaryOS
• mint
• PopOs
• EndevourOS
• Fedora
• arch
• Opensuse
• Novara

Tiling Window Manager:

Recomended to use something based on wayland.

• hyprland (can be configured from file, good compatibility with nix)
• sway (proposed with Debian, multiple suggestions, config via file as well, good for custom keybindings, already options for sway in nixos)
• i3
• bspwm
• KDE Plasma
• dwm / dwl

Status Bar:

• swaybar (in case of using sway)
• waybar (when using wayland)
• eww
• ags
• KDE neon

Package Managers:

• flatpack
• brew (is this already stable enough?)
• Nix (obvious choice if nix os chosen)
• snap
• (pacman if arch)
• integrated one

Packages:

• together with wayland alacritty or kitty
• foot
• Yakuake
• suckless

At the moment I am trying to avoid anything where RedHat is involved. Not because of the recent controversy, but simply IBM is known to kill their software solutions on a whim. (although i still use ansible), so Fedora is unfortunately out (again, no judging on how great it is). I’ve been quite interested in EndevourOS, so that might be fun to try out. Debian for the desktop probably not right now. I’m running it on servers for stability, but for a desktop environment, i prefer having more recent packages (e.g. neovim). The “sales pitch” for Mint sounded pretty interesting as well. However i’ll give NixOs a try first, simply because it was mentioned very often, same with sway.

Based on this i’ll try out these combinations first:

1. NixOs with sway and eww
2. NixOs with hyprland and waybar
3. NixOs with dwl and ?

If this does not satisfy, i’ll look into endevourOS and mint, but that might require some Ansible I assume.

Thank you very much!

I’d suggest Linux Mint.

• Simple UI
• (Xfce version specifically) is very fast (within reason; it’s still a modern OS)
• It’s already pretty keyboard-centric and it can be improved further if you like tinkering (my reason for dropping Windows was precisely lack of keyboard-centric controls, so if I stick to Mint, I guess it’s good on that front)
• Keys can be custom mapped, although I guess most bigger Linux systems allow that either out of the box, or through 3rd party software
• Unsure what a “dotfile” is, so can’t comment on that
• And Mint is still slowly adding animations to its functions (to some people’s dismay), and I don’t feel lag when alt-tabbing around, so I guess it is snappy too

for example user passwords just vanished/changed without any external influence, not allowing access anymore

Could you elaborate on this? It doesn’t happen for me and thousands of other NixOS users. Did you create some sort of impermanence setup or anything?

a minimal, configurable (file based for git) tiling window manager

I like i3, it ticks all your boxes. Made my own config in 2020 and it still works. Keep in mind that you have to design your whole desktop enviroment when you go the window manager route. bspwm might be an option as well

terminal based package management as easy as brew (maybe Nix?)

Every linux distro has it, I’m an Arch person, many people like Archs package manager pacman, so you could go with EndevourOS or if you’re adventorous with vsnilla Arch.

as much terminal emulator based as possible (i honestly mostly only need a browser and the terminal, most other apps have a TUI that i can use with the keyboard, see the above requirement)

Well, what kind of software you’ll run is up to you. Linux has all the TUI stuff. If you haven’t already, check out vim, emacs and nnn. Don’t forget to customize your shell (and choose it first, i would recommend zsh or fish).

General advice: Look into r/unixporn, most posts there have dotfiles, look for something you like an try it (with a fresh user that you can delete afterwarda maybe?)

I like NixOS and haven’t had any struggles with it. For my tiling I use Hyprland, as it’s Wayland and looks very nice. For a bar with amazing configuration I can recommend either https://github.com/elkowar/eww or https://github.com/aylur/ags - in the first one you configure it in a lisp-like language, the second one is configured in JS. They both allow you to pretty much write any GTK widgets for your bar, and are really powerful, but ags is newer and allows for more advanced functionality.

My favorite terminal emulator is foot - it’s simple and quick.

I wouldn’t say Nix is easy at the beginning as you have to learn a language to use it properly, but it’s definitely worth it long-term.

There shouldn’t be any issues with 2 keyboards and custom layouts on Linux. If anything you could use something like hawck to rebind the keys (system-wide) to something else.

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I forgot one essential tool, where I need a recommendation for: spotlight. I use it to switch quickly between applications or to folders. Keyboard shortcut, first letter of the application name and enter… I know there are solutions, but I only heard from Ubuntu, which I don’t want. Anything simple and fast you can recommend?

I have a very keyboard heavy setup and have used the same distro for 5 years, I might be biased. That said…

Try KDE neon, you can set up a top bar and shortcut pretty much everything. It’s based on Ubuntu so you can get some familiarity.

For terminal you can look into Tmux. It’s pretty cool shortcutty terminal multiplexer that you can bring with you if you ssh into a server.

Yakuake is also nice, quake style drop down terminal that I use to launch apps or run some of my bash functions.

All in all, give it a go, imo Linux has the most modern display managers, most customization and best multitasking tools.

I believe Arch+i3 would answers your needs.

If you want to go really minimal you could use alpine Linux with dwl as a window compositor and st ans your terminal emulator

I currently run arch with kitty and hyprland but I’m thinking about switching back to Novara and arch in a distrobox or going with bedrock Linux with arch and nobara as a daily driver