I am not satisfied with KDE, Mate and LXDE. I want an OS with a tiling window manager and nothing more.
I would like to compile the operating system kernel myself for my computer. Possibly with GNU hurd kernel or Linux-libre or OpenBSD. By installing the tiling window manager Ratpoison or awesome. How should I do it?
Compiling the kernel is quite hard regardless of the OS, as far as linux at least... no idea about any BSD... and as for tiling window managers well, that usually isn't hard, the best window managers in my opinion is JWM which is not a tiling manager, and i3-wm, which you can set up keybindings anyway you want, such as pressing alt and f to start firetools for example. Also works in JWM, if you hav JWMKIT...
That being said, If you want a minimalistic OS, OpenBSD, is definitely one of them.
Hyperbola is also minimalistic, if you using 0.4, but its still in testing format, mostly stable, but yeah, not quite!
Compiling your own kernel... As far as I know Utoto is an FSF approved version of Gentoo. Otherwise what you want is Gentoo. Check out this page:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Installation_on_libreboot#Use_a_Kernel_without_blobs
Personally though I always find DE-less to be misguided. You don't want volume controll? Or you do so you'll install an applet? What about brightness control? Another applet? And then disk mounting, or will you do that yourself manually? Compose keys? Will you keep your applets in a tray, so stalone tray? Then you'll want a program launcher, so demu or rofi? Oh and then notifications right, so dunst? And then, and then, and then... before you know it you've installed so many one off things to try to get a basic desktop working that ends up inferior and chances are more "bloated" to just installing a DE.
What I recommend instead is pick a desktop environment you like the most (or hate the least) and swap out the Window Manager with your favorite one. This is trivial on MATE, KDE, and LXQT/DE (I don't know about GNOME). I find KDE to be the best (I prefer "power tools" to "minimalist", try Konsole's split paneling, I think it's a better tiling window manager than tiling window managers or screen/tmux, I usually have a fullscreen Konsole on a seperate workspace specifically for commandline stuff that I use basically as tiling window manager).
In my experience, volumecontrol and cbatticon dont add that much bloat, those two things added to jwm + jwmkit and you have all you really need. I do this already with the exception of volumeicon. :)
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Installation_on_libreboot
Those are nice instructions. Nevertheless, for "maintaining FSF Certified Status" (title of a section), the ACCEPT_LICENSE variable should be defined as "-* @FSF-APPROVED @FSF-APPROVED-OTHER". With @FREE, you get licenses that are not FSF-approved. Reference: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Full/Installation#Optional:_Configuring_the_ACCEPT_LICENSE_variable
You still have to be careful though. For example, Chromium's license is listed as BSD, an FSF-approved license, but it contains unrar, which is nonfree.
That's why there is unar which is actually free software.
Thankfully...
There's also unrar-free, which now supports the newer versions of the RAR format via libarchive. I think it is better than unar.
- posted in a wrong thread -
I've never installed ratpoison or awesome window managers, but I'm going to write a how-to on installing and using the DWM tiling manager (my personal favorite) on a minimal install of Trisquel. I should have written it awhile ago anyway. I'll put it in a new thread in the General Free Software Talk section of the forum.
On compiling a kernel, it's important to note that you really don't need to compile a Linux-libre kernel with Trisquel or with any Debian-based distro - jxself has all the Linux-libre kernels you could ever want in his easy to use repo: https://jxself.org/linux-libre/
If you want the latest, greatest 5.15 version, jxself has got it; if you want any of the long-term support Linux-libre kernels going all the way back to version 4.4, originally released 6 years ago, jxself has got it.
If you just really want to experience the pure unabashed joy of watching your computer shred its CPU cores for awhile compiling a kernel, leave me a reply here and I'll write down the steps for compiling Linux-libre on Trisquel for you. The steps are actually not that complicated. Don't expect to see any actual performance improvement though - you might see a miniscule amount, but more than likely the kernels from jxself's repo are going to perform as well if not better than one you compile on your own machine.