Configuration reference.

1  Package set

The install pulls base, linux and linux-firmware, then 24 additional packages. No package group is installed wholesale.

2  Memory and swap

Swap is not merely unused, it is masked, so that a later package cannot quietly enable it. vm.swappiness is redundant once swap is absent but is set anyway as documentation of intent.

vm.swappiness = 0
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50
vm.dirty_ratio = 10
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5

3  Display

The system boots to multi-user.target and dwm is started from ~/.bash_profile on tty1 only. There is no display manager, no xinitrc chain and no compositor, so startx is the entire graphical entry point.

[[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && exec startx

5  Audio, and why not PipeWire

This section is longer than it deserves to be, because it is the change people argue with most and the reasoning is the least obvious.

PipeWire is good software. It is better than what it replaced, it handles the hard cases correctly, and for almost everyone it is the right default. It is also roughly 60,000 lines of daemon sitting between an application and a sound card, and on this system the only thing that produces audio is a browser and occasionally mpv.

ALSA directly means no session daemon, no socket activation, no per-user service, and one fewer thing to restart when audio stops working. It also means exactly one application can hold the device at a time, which is a genuine regression — if a video is playing, a notification sound will simply not play. dmix exists and would solve this. It is not enabled here, because the failure is instructive: it makes the cost of the decision audible rather than theoretical.

defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.ctl.card 1
# no dmix — single client at a time, deliberately

The counter-argument, which is reasonable: this is dogma rather than engineering. Nobody's workflow is improved by losing notification sounds, and the memory saved is under 40 MB. If you are applying this configuration selectively, this is the first change to skip.

4  Known issues

• Video Playback above 1080p drops frames. Software decode only.
• Tearing Visible during fast horizontal motion. No compositor to prevent it.
• Sleep Suspend-to-disk unavailable without swap. Suspend-to-RAM works.
• Browsers Chromium requires --disable-gpu or it will fail to start.