Introduction

First, this is not a Wayland critique. Wayland has its place and is likely the future of Linux desktops. Still, some applications and workflows remain tied to X11 or don’t behave well under Wayland or XWayland.

The purpose of this video is to build a lightweight, usable Graphical User Interface (GUI) on Debian 13 (Trixie) using Xorg (X11), the SLIM‑Fork Login manager (Display Manager or DM), and JWM (Joe’s Window Manager), instead of more common Desktop Environments and DM’s.

The base setup I propose will work straight out of the box, even for beginners. It won’t be visually polished by default. Improving the appearance requires manually editing configuration files, an intermediate skill I’ll cover in future articles.

Before moving forward, I want to discuss the choices I have mentioned. This is Linux and there are different ways to do everything, and my choices do not imply the only way of doing something.

• Debian 13: Debian prioritizes stability over bleeding‑edge packages. That tradeoff suits 95% users. 5% are niche cases, and may need newer software, prohibitory software, and custom hardware drivers.
• Xorg: Many legacy GUI applications were designed for X11 and may not behave correctly under Wayland or XWayland. So Xorg knowledge remains both useful and needed, in spite of what the experts tell us.
• SLIM‑Fork: A maintained fork of the original SLIM (Simple Login Manager), which has been unmaintained since 2013. Slim-Fork has addressed several existing issues with newer Linux system environments. It is also light weight and relatively easy to configure.
• JWM: Joe’s Window Manager is a lightweight, actively maintained window manager with a small footprint and useful features (panel, menu, basic taskbar). While based on the single xlib library, other libraries can be incorporated for greater capability’s, especially with graphics.