Long-term affair with Openbox leads me here

Userland Introductions
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And hello!

I’m not exactly a refugee from Manjaro. It’s more that since Openbox is no longer being actively maintained, and I haven’t the time or resources to volunteer for that job myself, Mabox was the obvious choice when deciding how not to have to use Windoze 10 on my new-to-me desktop.

I’ve been using Linux for a billion years: I think I started with CentOS 5 on a 90’s-vintage Pentium box and a big Linux Bible from one computer book publisher or another. I fell in love with Openbox when crunchbang made it beautiful and awesome and easy to use.

Since then I have made a few detours into distros intended for multimedia production. I do a lot of digital things, but I am mostly doing music/sound design and digital graphics, both moving and not. AVLinux was cool, but Debian was so behind the times that I couldn’t get updated tools. So I decided to try Manjaro and it has worked quite well with Jack2 on this old HP laptop.

But it was time to upgrade. I now have a 6th-generation i5 Dell with a fantastically large 4k screen, and I am hoping it lasts me for most of the rest of my working life.

I am just finishing installing Mabox on it. If anyone has tips on audio production on this spin, I’d be happy to hear them. I plan on sticking with Jack while Pipewire matures, but I follow Unfa on YouTube and it seems to be doing that fairly quickly, so. We’ll see. I am old and so moving more slowly while time speeds up to a completely incomprehensible rate of passage. So big changes anywhere introduce large delays everywhere, and I am feeling the press of mortality…

At the moment it looks like the first thing I will need to do is scale up the interface while keeping the same resolution on my monitor. So much real estate! Such tiny fonts! There must be a middle way.

Thanks for putting this together and continuing to keep it running. And for including Jack2 by default and bash instead of zshell. I’m done with trying to keep up with the cool kids; I need tools that work with just a small amount of tinkering.

And now to stay up all night with Surge and AudioDamage’s vast array of Linux-compatible plugins. Just have to remember to switch to headphones at 22:00.

Oh. I’m in Seattle WA on the southern Salish Sea, where it is raining buckets outside. The world is, for this one moment, as it should be.

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Hello @josefk , and welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Personally, I haven’t had the opportunity to configure Openbox on high-resolution screens yet.
But I have an article on this topic saved in bookmarks.
Maybe it will be useful to you.
Here is a link for English translation:
Change DPI in Openbox / Xorg for HiDPI monitor

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Thanks! Good, useful info in there–and I would never have thought to use bash to compute the dimensions of my screen using the Pythagorean Theorem! I’ll keep it open while I work with different apps. So far the desktop environment you have assembled around OB works fine if I just set larger font/icon sizes, but when I start looking at DAWs and video editing software, I may need to reset the DPI to get an interface I can see from more than a few inches away. :eyeglasses: :mag:

Right now I’m having fun tweaking all the settings. It’s almost like actually doing something productive while at the same time just playing around. Now, if I could get someone to pay me for this…

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