4 ms·

Can someone ELI5 why one would want sway vs just using i3?

• yellowapple 9y ago
  Sway uses Wayland, which is shiny and new and fast. i3 uses X11, which is old and crusty and not particularly fast.
  • djur 9y ago
    But apparently a big difference between X11 and Wayland is that people implementing X11 window managers don't have to go out of their way to support particular graphics hardware. I have never in almost two decades of using X11 on Linux found myself worrying about whether my window manager supported my graphics card.
    • pritambaral 9y ago
      That's because X11 is a standard, running on a stack of other standards (DRM, KMS, etc.). Wayland is also a standard, that should be running on a stack of other standards (DRM, GBM, etc.), but then Nvidia comes along and goes "Fuck GBM. I'll make my own, incompatible "standard"".
      • badsectoracula 9y ago
        No, that is because X servers only provide the mechanism (window system, graphics, events, input, etc) but not the policy while providing functionality for the clients to provide that policy themselves. So a window manager can be made with and rely only to functionality provided by X11. On Wayland the "window manager" (compositor) has to provide both the mechanism and the policy.