Lumina is a lightweight desktop environment that is free of D-Bus (and all its failures) and *kit and is designed to have as few system dependencies and requirements as possible. Check out the Lumina Wikipedia article and their official handbook.

To install Lumina desktop, run the command:

pacman -S lumina lumina-extra

Do note that Lumina, just like any other window manager, needs a windowing server protocol to connect to in order to be a runnable solution. On Hyperbola, the solution to this is not X11 but Xenocara, and so if that was not already installed, let's do so now:

pacman -S xenocara

For the best performance with your graphics hardware, make sure you have also installed the package corresponding to your video card according to the table in the Driver Installation section of the above article.

The installed configuration file is /etc/luminaDesktop.conf. Lumina also has a bunch of its own configuration tools.

Most users will need to give themselves device access rights to get working sound output, video acceleration and more. Don't miss out on configuring the fixes listed in our OpenRC groups section.

For some more specific setup, such as to make devices like laptop trackpads more comfortable, the configuration files for Xenocara allow for a lot of low-level adaptability. One improvement over being reliant on D-Bus is that a lot of details of device initialization was, with D-Bus, hidden away from users and had less exposition of their configuration. To specifically control the setup of a laptop trackpad, a configuration section such as the below could be added to a new file created at

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
                Option "TapButton1" "1"
                Option "TapButton2" "2"
                Option "TapButton3" "3"
                Option "VertEdgeScroll" "on"
                Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on"
                Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "on"
                Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "on"
                Option "CircularScrolling" "on"
                Option "CircScrollTrigger" "2"
                Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinZ" "40"
                Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinW" "8"
                Option "CoastingSpeed" "0"
EndSection

Lumina provides its own replacement command for startx to be started from the console.

start-lumina-desktop

Alternatively, it can be added to the ~./xinitrc file for being started via startx or a display manager.

Make sure to read this article for more information on managing startx on Arch GNU/Linux. (The information applies to Hyperbola as well.) But the relevant commands are below:

[[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -merge -I$HOME ~/.Xresources
exec start-lumina-desktop

• Official webpage.
• Moore, Ken (26 April 2014). "Quick Lumina Desktop FAQ".
• Lumina source code.