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Comment by zahlman

> Additionally, I disagreed with the default way of installing Qtile. As a principle, I never sudo pip install anything. Instead, I asked my friend Karthikeyan Singaravel, who is a Python core developer, and he recommended using the deadsnakes PPA for Ubuntu to install any version of Python that I chose. I tried compiling python 3.10 myself, installing to /opt/qtile/ using configure --prefix /opt/qtile/ during the configuration stage of the source code. However, I admit that using deadsnakes is a far better idea since I could create a virtual environment based on python3.10 into /opt/qtile/ instead. I had to change the owner of the folder to my user account. Note that I could store the virtual environment in my home folder and just use that, but I wanted to isolate this outside of my home folder.

Qtile doesn't appear to be tied to a specific Python version. Could you not have made a virtual environment based off the system Python? For that matter, could you not have made a virtual environment from a local compiled-from-source Python? (I do that all the time, because I'm interested in testing against specific Python versions and comparing their performance characteristics.)

> Then, I changed the owner of the folder to my regular user account.

> Then, it was time to install qtile.

> I created /usr/share/xsessions/qtile.desktop and filled it with the following:

Doesn't this require the environment to be owned by root? Doesn't it make more sense to leave things that are in /opt as root-owned anyway? (Or at least, change them back after running the installation as an unprivileged user.)

> After this, I logged out of my previous window manager and switched to the new entry for Qtile.

Will any random greeter program just naturally pick up the contents of /usr/share/xsessions, then?

> Qtile’s config file rests at ~/.config/qtile/config.py

So does it just ignore all your other dotfiles? Can I safely just try this out regardless of my usual WM/DE choices?

parent zahlman 11 months ago

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