MARBS

MARBS is an efficient shell script that will install a fully-featured, modern, wayland tiling window manager-based meta-desktop environment on any Arch or Artix Linux distros, without any of the routine of manual post-install processes and configuration (mostly).

Three types of MARBS users

Is MARBS for you? Probably yes. I don’t know how else you would’ve found this site. The script is for three types of people:

  1. People who already know their stuff and just want to automate installing a system without doing the boring stuff you’ve done a million times.
  2. LARBS users and those postponing the migration from Xorg to Wayland.
  3. Novices who want to use and learn about a hackerman computer setup like those in the movies for either efficiency or looking cool.

No actual phonies allowed though. The goal of the system for novices is helping you understand how a good Unix system works and how it is modified. I give huge amounts of documentation for this, but this is not a hand-holding desktop environment that does things automatically for you. Instead, you realize how easy it is to set things up automatically yourself.

Installation

On a fresh installation of Arch Linux or Artix Linux, create a sudo privileged user, log in to it and run the following:

curl -LO marbs.kuchta.dev/marbs.sh
sh marbs.sh

MARBS will then guide you through installation, which is typically relatively snappy.

Note that the MARBS scripts will not partition any drives or wipe anything, but when it deploys the dotfiles, it will overwrite any preexisting files: e.g. the MARBS bashrc will replace your old bashrc, etc. To avoid even this risk, you can tell MARBS to install for a new username and nothing will be overwritten. There’s also an Artix-based ISO with MARBS preinstalled for you to test.

First steps inside the system

Once you have installed MARBS and logged out, you see that logging in on TTY1 brings you to the graphical environment. This is the thing! The power is all but within your fingertips to launch any program, do your coding, organize files, enjoy a movie or do literally anything! Virtually no mouse required. To get started on doing so:

🎥Watch the MARBS first steps video

Programs

Here are the main programs, all with extra information here:

Learning the system is fun and easy!

The beginner’s guide/video only covers the basis You can figure out about the system in a lot of different ways:

No un-features