Miscellaneous

Window Server

If you haven't installed any DE such as Gnome or KDE, after booting up your computer, you will be greeted by the TTY. Here, you can run $ startx to initiate your WM like i3.

To run this command automatically after a successful login, copy this code either into ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zprofile, depending on which shell runs after startup.

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]; then
    startx
fi

Fonts

You can download fonts with the extension .ttf and move them to the appropriate directory to use them.

# mv Downloads/FiraCodeNerdFont-Regular.ttf /usr/local/share/fonts/

I recommend downloading a Nerd Font because they contain many useful glyphs. Similarly, install the Noto Font by Google for emojis.

Interface (GTK)

For apps using GTK, you can download themes into /usr/share/themes and icons into /usr/share/icons from websites like this one. Keep in mind that for apps using GTK-4.0, you also need to copy some files into ~/.config/gtk-4.0/. Usually, the themes will come with these instructions provided.

To set the appearance, you can download lxappearance and manually set the new themes and icons. To see the changes, you must reboot; however, you can download an xsettings daemon like xsettingsd, and prepare a ~/.xsettingsd or ~/.config/xsettingsd/.xsettingsd file with the following content:

Net/IconThemeName "ThemeName"
Net/ThemeName "ThemeName"

Then, you can send a Hang-Up signal with $ pkill -HUP xsettingsd to dynamically reload these changes. You can read about more configuration options here.

Mimetypes

To enable apps to open web pages, run $ nano ~/.config/mimeapps.list and add:

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/https=chromium.desktop
x-scheme-handler/http=chromium.desktop

Bell

You can mute your PC speaker bell with terminal commands. For example, in Xorg, you can do $ xset -b. However, to mute it globally and permanently, create a /etc/modprobe.d/nobeep.conf file and add blacklist pcspkr to it.