What is Reddit's opinion of Sway?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

If you're not using Nvidia you should be basically fine. My personal recommendation is swaywm. It's basically a better i3 and for Wayland. I've used it for a few months now and I prefer it over i3.

Check out tiling window manages. There exist many like sway, i3, bspwm and awesome wm.

Once you've customized them to your liking they make managing windows super easy and efficient.

Here's a video showing off some of the basic tiling functions of swaywm: https://swaywm.org/

I recently switched to Sway, the process of which cascaded into running as much as possible on my machine through Wayland. I compiled everything I discovered and configured into this guide.

To give you a sample, the following are now running completely through Wayland on my machine: Sway itself, Waybar, the Wofi app launcher, browsers (and screen sharing), Emacs, all GTK apps, and most QT apps. I worked through some gotchas with Steam and Input Methods too. Overall things are much "snappier" and I'm quite happy with the result!

Please enjoy the guide, and do let me know if you notice any issues. Cheers!

Hey, looks neat. Couple of comments on your script if you don't mind.

You call dnf multiple times, I assume to make the script look cleaner, but you could put all of your packages into an array and then give that array to dnf like...

packages=(

# i3 basics

nodejs-devel i3 i3lock xdm

# other stuff

dunst xss-lock

)

dnf -y install ${packages[*]}

This is how I prefer to do it in my scripts since dnf is kind of slow and running it multiple times can add up. Also you can pass -y to dnf to install without user interaction. Also also, you could just run the script as a normal user and put a sudo in front of the now-single dnf command. That way all of your dotfiles and such would be owned by your user instead of root.

Always happy to see another i3 (actually I use sway :p) user. Good luck!

Lately i decided to learn some alternative and decided to switch to EndeavourOS with SwayWM. I use sway for 6 months now. I love it. It needs quite a bit tinkering and love as it's not really a DE, but result really pleases me. It's light, fast and I really like how SwayWM works and can be configured. I prefer configuration through files than ui as it's faster. It prioritizes using keyboard shortcuts above mouse and I was afraid how it will work, but it's really good and comfy for me. Much healthier for my hands and wrists.

Sway flavor is community edition and still may be buggy from time to time. I don't have much exp with tiling window managers, but if you want official flavor you can choose i3.

As I understand SwayWM is a fork of i3 and moving from i3 to swayWM is as easy as copying config files to it, so later transition should be easy.

I completely changed config of default flavor though, using some ideas from default configs.

If you like playing with configuration, you can/want to write some shell scripts from time to time then you can try it.

https://swaywm.org/

Well, sway is a tiling window manager and not a full desktop environment. I personally love it but it's certainly not for everyone, it's basically a shortcut driven terminal experience for every window. I'd suggest you watch the introduction video on swaywm.org before you try it out.

That's why I keep KDE around for coworkers, friends and family.

Never used one, can't speak to it, but I'm pretty damn happy with my Redragon Perdition. It's gonna take a lot of convincing to switch off of a mouse with 12 side buttons, especially given I use sway

Your lucky because you have intel graphics. There is a program for Wayland that works the same as i3 and can use the same config. I used to use intel graphics on Wayland and never had these issues.

Edit: I forgot to link it so here it is https://swaywm.org/

I recently switched to Sway, the process of which cascaded into running as much as possible on my machine through Wayland. I compiled everything I discovered and configured into this guide.

To give you a sample, the following are now running completely through Wayland on my machine: Sway itself, Waybar, the Wofi app launcher, browsers (and screen sharing), Emacs, all GTK apps, and most QT apps. I worked through some gotchas with Steam and Input Methods too. Overall things are much "snappier" and I'm quite happy with the result!

Please enjoy the guide, and do let me know if you notice any issues. Cheers!

I'm using Sway with Arch Linux myself as a pure wayland setup.

I tried using asciinema in the past to record Texel sessions but it always broke the UTF-8 characters on render. I'm guessing this won't be an issue with t-rec since you capture the screen?

Personally I would have to run i3 gaps, I'm ok with tiling schemes but for some reason having tiles abut each other with zero pixel spacing is an aesthetic that bugs me. Also Sway is popular, but I'm not sure if it's intended strictly for use with Wayland.

Upside: Stable yet current, and developer/geek friendly. I have mostly used Debian or Arch, and whenever I was using one, I missed the other. Fedora has the things I like about both. I honestly don't miss anything when I am using it.

Downside: so current and geeky, I can't stop fiddling with it. Especially when I inevitably stray away from Gnome and try out tiling window managers (looking at you , Sway).

I've never used ultrawide. What I really like about multimonitor is that i3 splits the workspaces between the monitors, so I can change the workspace for monitor 1 while keeping the workspace for monitor 2. I've also got keybindings to push workspaces to a different monitor. This creates a really nice workflow that would only be possible with multimonitor.

That being said, if you've got an ultrawide monitor laying around, using i3 on it sounds really great!

EDIT about 4k monitors: If you don't use an nvidia GPU, you might want to check out sway. It's a Wayland clone for i3. Because it runs on Wayland instead of X11, scaling for high res monitors is really good.

https://swaywm.org/

> Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras.

Wayland does not have the same problems with screen tearing as X11.

https://swaywm.org/

Its not a desktop environment though, its a tiling window manager and compositor.
Here is a somewhat decent comparison between the two: https://www.lifewire.com/window-manager-vs-the-desktop-environment-in-linux-4588338

Fedora32 indeed uses Wayland, instead of Xorg/X11 (during login you can choose with the little cog in the right bottom corner if you want to use the X11 version).

You could also condider using Sway. It is an i3 compatible Wayland version. I use it already since late last year. Really like it, and very snappy.

You can find SwayWm on: https://swaywm.org/

Sway is in de Fedora repository and can be install with: sudo dnf install sway

Fedora magazine has a nice article to get you started: https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-manager-on-fedora/

After install you can, at the loginscreen, use the little cog in the right bottom corner to choose sway as your desktop.

Hope this helps to consider a second chance for Fedora. Take care!

Hello. I don't use i3 anymore personally, but Sway has a feature to fix exactly this problem. You simply pass your final launcher command to swaymsg. So for example my launcher command is

j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu="(cat ; (stest -flx $(echo $PATH | tr : ' ') | sort -u)) | dmenu -i" --no-generic | swaymsg exec --

The | swaymsg exec -- at the end being the relevant bit. I don't know if i3msg provides this functionality, but that's the best solution I have.

Unfortunately, it may just be that nobody's building i3-gaps for Fedora 32 yet. Copr's are just little repositories maintained by individuals who don't really have any external reason to make sure their builds are functioning properly in a timely manner.

You could always give compiling the code yourself a try in the meantime. They have a wiki page on building it. It's pretty straightforward.

As a side note, sway supports gaps and is in the default Fedora 32 repositories, and is my WM of choice. :)

background: sourcehut is a code hosting service/software, created by drew devault, which is probably best known for creating the Sway wayland window manager, and wlroots.

Agreed, I have the same monitor which I bought for $460 from Newegg. I also use it for programming. I use Sway which is a tiling window manager. Switched over from a dual monitor setup to one of these. It's nice having 3 or more columns of terminals open without any bezels between them.

However there are some problems with this monitor.

1. if you sit too close then up to about 5 px of the edges disappear, so you can't see scroll bars on the edge of a maximized window. It reappears if you sit farther away or if you reposition to look at the part of the screen perpendicularly though.
2. mine has some annoying backlight bleeding
3. there are also some minor ghosting and banding but this is typical of a budget IPS monitor and is not too serious

Lack of i3-gaps is easily fixed with Sway, which is pretty much identical, only on Wayland instead. It even reads your existing config file, so just install it, type sway from a TTY and you're done, you're using Wayland (except if you're using nvidia of course)

What you're experiencing i screen tearing. It's a problem with X.org and Nvidia. I solved it by switching to Wayland (I'm on Sway, which is an i3-replacement for Wayland).

There are a pletora of solutions for screen tearing, but none of them seemed to work for me.

OS: Debian Sid

WM: Sway

Wallpaper: Dark Souls 3 Firekeeper

Music Player: cmus

Icons: FontAwesome

Other tweaks: No window borders, inner and outer gaps both 5 px (for cleaness).

This is why projects like wlroots exist.
Sway uses (wrote) it, and it works great.

Though, AFAIK, GNOME and KDE are each doing their own thing, rather than a collaborative effort on a base library.

I see you commented that you were thinking about trying i3, which is a great choice. But if you're okay with Wayland, I'd suggest you try out Sway. I'm using it on Arch and it's a beauty to work with. The default configuration file is all you need to get started, and it's so much fun to play around with (also works with any i3 configuration in case you move to or from i3).