Hey there! So after taking your advice this is the result. Ended up going with the following setup, nothing too over the top:
- OS: Debian 12 - bookworm
- Color Scheme • Everforest - Good vibes!
- Icons • Papyrus
- Terminal • Alacritty
- Desktop • Gnome
- Gnome tweaks and extension for shell theme and dock
- Showoff stuff • cbonsai, catnip (sound visualizer) and ranger (as suggested), still doing the dynamic wallpaper thing but because it's for KDE Plasma I'll have to find an alternative or code it myself.
Mine is forked from a guy named gvolpe. So, if you run into problems, comparing his and mine might illuminate some things.
I’m in the process of updating the stripped-down VM config that lives in that repo but it’s a really good start if you run it as a VM. You’d just need new hardware-configuration.nix files for the actual ID’s of the drives that the VM creates. I’m sure someone smarter than me has a proper one..but they’re not using xmonad and polybar! ;)