11mo ago

Your recommendations for (Wayland) tiling window managers? Need some guidance before getting started

I'm interested in TWMs for some while now.
Currently, I'm running Gnome with the Forge extension, which gives me a quite nice tiling with the full fledged DE experience I need.

Especially Hyprland is the project I have an eye on the most. The ultra-smooth animations are just out of this world! (I'm not only locked on Hyprland tho.)

My current setup feels a bit clunky, and I want something proper, without losing the comfort of a fully functioning DE.
My end goal maybe would be making my own uBlue-image with a setup that works sane out of the box.

Are there any setups and recommendations of needed packages?

How do Sway, Hyprland and other TWMs differ from each other?
Which one would you recommend for starters, and which one is "the best"?

What do I need to know before getting started? Should I just dive into it head first?

If I have to ask all these questions, would you just say I should ditch the idea for now, with my current level of knowledge and time?

What has your experience been? Any problems I may encounter?

Thank you for your answers?

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33 comments

Sway is a great manual tiler and I've had no issues with it for years. Sadly it doesn't have animations, since the devs don't want to add features not in i3. Imo this limits its potential, because even i3 supports animations through external compositors like picom.
river has imo the best (dynamic) tiling, but it has seperate workspaces for each monitor, instead of a single set moveable between monitors.
Hyprland supports manual and dynamic tiling, and almost any other configuration I can imagine. My hyprland keybindings are basically a copy of rivers default. Having hundreds of options available makes it a bit difficult to find the correct ones at first, but once it's done it's done (and hopefully version controlled/backed up with git).
- Is there a fork of Sway, that is more future oriented and wants to break that original idea of just replacing i3?
  I've heard something of SwayFX. Is it something like that?
  I think I will just try many different ones with someone else's customisation in a VM and see what I like.
  
  I've never tried SwayFX, as animations aren't really important for me (altough I currently use them (sped up) on hyprland).
  Edit: Remember that almost all apps/bars/launcher available in those preconfigurations also work on other compositors. I personally recommend to make note which tools you like and assemble them to a desktop you like on any compositors. E.g. my desktop looks and works nearly identical on Sway and Hyprland.
  
  animations aren’t really important for me
  I don't think SwayFX has animations yet, it's on the roadmap but for now it's window blur, rounded corners, etc.
  
  Thanks, I forgot rounded corners and window blur are also not supported by Sway. Especially blur does have it's non-cosmetic use cases, so maybe it'll just take a decade until they accept a contribution. i3 also didn't include the i3-gaps patches for many years.
  I do appreciate how quick navigation on sway is without unnecessary delays through animations. But especially for touchpad gestures animations are sorely lacking. Switching between workspaces with 1:1 gestures feels awesome and the main reason for me trying hyprland, besides dynamic tiling.
  
  labwc is amazing too, try it.
  The only thing I haven't figured out is how to run a graphic application as one user from another.
  In X you simply do
  sudo -u user2 firefox
  as user1, in wayland you can't, even if a seatd is running for that other user as well.
  @Chewy7324 @callyral
  
  It's great to see a Wayland window-stacking compositor to cater to those who like Openbox, altough personally prefer tiling wms.
  Why do you want to run an application as another user on the same OS? My only guess would be for isolation through seperate home directories, because with X they could still log keys, so it's not enough for proper sandboxing.
  It might be possible to (mis)use waypipe for this purpose, altough I don't know good the performance would be compared to direct rendering.

33 comments