7 ms·

Sway: i3-compatible Wayland compositor – 1.0-beta.1 released

91 points by manukall 8y ago

dijit 8y ago
I know this is about sway, but I feel I can't pass up this opportunity to profess my undying love for i3. The learning curve is relatively minor for such a slim powerful system I'm truly amazed. I really can't thank the original author(s) enough. RE: Sway, I'm glad they hit this milestone, I have a friend who is using it and he claims it's almost as good, (although he hasn't found a way to do -gaps yet..). Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved?
- lscotte 8y ago
  i3 really is just incredible and simple - and not at all opinionated about what other components you use (statusbar, menu, notification system, screen locker, etc).
  - santix 8y ago
    And also its documentation is excellent.
- trulyrandom 8y ago
  >Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved? Wayland and Sway don't touch font rendering as far as I know. There should be no difference between font rendering on X and Wayland. Perhaps you were getting blurred out fonts due to scaling?
  - dijit 8y ago
    I guess what I mean is the the font rendering tweaks to give you really nice font dithering etc; didn't used to work. I'm thinking the freetype2 project for example. The fonts always appeared super sharp and jagged on Wayland when compared to X11.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Sway maintainer here, i3-gaps is fully supported. Can you direct your friend to our support channels? #sway on irc.freenode.net, or open a GitHub issue. Font rendering on sway is in all respects equivalent to font rendering on i3.
Majestic121 8y ago
"Experimental Nvidia support has been deprecated since its inception, and has now been removed entirely. Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from GPU vendors that support open source. Other proprietary drivers are also unsupported." How is nouveau doing this days compared to the proprietary drivers of NVidia ?
- rusticpenn 8y ago
  Yes, IT puts me in a wierd situation as I need nvidia for machine learning related stuff, and I would love to move from i3 to sway...
  - naibafo 8y ago
    I have an integrated intel card in my notebook, and an extra nvidia card that I use with proprietary driver and bumblebee. That works great with sway
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    Can you get a cheap Radeon as a display card?
    - Cacti 8y ago
      Why would anyone go out, buy a new Radeon, install it in their computers (assuming there is room, which in ML cases is not always true), and reconfigure any drivers and all the other hassle, just to use a window manager? That's assuming such a thing is even possible (e.g. work restrictions).
      - robin_reala 8y ago
        Because they “would love to move from i3 to sway”? The cheapest passive Radeon is less than $50 on Newegg and I’m sure a lot cheaper second-hand, and $50 doesn’t seem like much to spend on something one would love to do.
mistaken 8y ago
Another interesting project which is similar to awesome: http://way-cooler.org/ http://way-cooler.org/
trulyrandom 8y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18265793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18265793
sevensor 8y ago
Sway is great -- for my purposes (which are mostly arranging terminal emulators) it's been indistinguishable from i3 for well over a year. Unfortunately some of the systems I use are burdened with Nvidia cards, which don't seem to work well with Wayland no matter which driver I use. (It's even worse with Gnome!) Anywhere I have AMD or Intel graphics, I use Sway very happily.
clircle 8y ago
Congrats to the sway developers on this milestone. i3 is one of the 'killer apps' of the linux ecosystem and the developers of sway are doing god's work by translating i3 for the wayland compositor. Excited to use this soon if it lands in Debian 10 Buster.
zdragnar 8y ago
Am I seeing this right? Third party screen capture? Practically the only reason I'm still on i3 instead of sway is sharing my screen (as I work from home and do a few video calls a week). edit: spelling. I am apparently terrible at leaving comments from my phone.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  We implemented our half of the equation, but the other half (clients) is still poorly supported. However, you can share Xwayland windows in Chromium.
Symmetry 8y ago
My current setup is to run xmonad as my window manager within an otherwise normal Gnome session. Is there a way to do this with Sway, possibly with some other desktop environment if I had to?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  No, this is not currently possible, but it's something we're working on. It requires buy-in from e.g. Gnome, which is hard to get. KDE is more amenable to this. By the way, check out waymonad, it's based on the same wlroots library as sway: https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad
danieldk 8y ago
I am really looking forward to using Sway. I briefly tried the beta and it worked very nicely. However, one problem that prevents me from switching completely is that with 2x scaling, XWayland apps are scaled up from a lower DPI, resulting in very blurry rendering. As far as I understand, this is a problem in XWayland and GNOME uses a hack to make XWayland applications render without scaling (since X11 Qt/Gtk+ applications use their own scaling). But it makes using Firefox et al. way more convenient to use.
- naibafo 8y ago
  Same for me. Though there is a wayland version of firefox, which I plan on trying out.
red-tea 8y ago
I use i3 currently. I might remove the old nvidia card from my box and purge the nvidia drivers from my system. The Intel graphics will be good enough. I run Gentoo but I don't want my graphical stuff to be high maintenance. Can anyone comment on whether it's worth it to move to wayland/sway?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Whether it's worth it depends on the user. Try it, it's free!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

91 points by manukall 8y ago

I know this is about sway, but I feel I can't pass up this opportunity to profess my undying love for i3. The learning curve is relatively minor for such a slim powerful system I'm truly amazed. I really can't thank the original author(s) enough. RE: Sway, I'm glad they hit this milestone, I have a friend who is using it and he claims it's almost as good, (although he hasn't found a way to do -gaps yet..). Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved?

lscotte 8y ago
i3 really is just incredible and simple - and not at all opinionated about what other components you use (statusbar, menu, notification system, screen locker, etc).
- santix 8y ago
  And also its documentation is excellent.
trulyrandom 8y ago
>Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved? Wayland and Sway don't touch font rendering as far as I know. There should be no difference between font rendering on X and Wayland. Perhaps you were getting blurred out fonts due to scaling?
- dijit 8y ago
  I guess what I mean is the the font rendering tweaks to give you really nice font dithering etc; didn't used to work. I'm thinking the freetype2 project for example. The fonts always appeared super sharp and jagged on Wayland when compared to X11.
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Sway maintainer here, i3-gaps is fully supported. Can you direct your friend to our support channels? #sway on irc.freenode.net, or open a GitHub issue. Font rendering on sway is in all respects equivalent to font rendering on i3.

Majestic121 8y ago

"Experimental Nvidia support has been deprecated since its inception, and has now been removed entirely. Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from GPU vendors that support open source. Other proprietary drivers are also unsupported." How is nouveau doing this days compared to the proprietary drivers of NVidia ?

rusticpenn 8y ago
Yes, IT puts me in a wierd situation as I need nvidia for machine learning related stuff, and I would love to move from i3 to sway...
- naibafo 8y ago
  I have an integrated intel card in my notebook, and an extra nvidia card that I use with proprietary driver and bumblebee. That works great with sway
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Can you get a cheap Radeon as a display card?
  - Cacti 8y ago
    Why would anyone go out, buy a new Radeon, install it in their computers (assuming there is room, which in ML cases is not always true), and reconfigure any drivers and all the other hassle, just to use a window manager? That's assuming such a thing is even possible (e.g. work restrictions).
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      Because they “would love to move from i3 to sway”? The cheapest passive Radeon is less than $50 on Newegg and I’m sure a lot cheaper second-hand, and $50 doesn’t seem like much to spend on something one would love to do.

mistaken 8y ago

Another interesting project which is similar to awesome: http://way-cooler.org/ http://way-cooler.org/

trulyrandom 8y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18265793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18265793

sevensor 8y ago

Sway is great -- for my purposes (which are mostly arranging terminal emulators) it's been indistinguishable from i3 for well over a year. Unfortunately some of the systems I use are burdened with Nvidia cards, which don't seem to work well with Wayland no matter which driver I use. (It's even worse with Gnome!) Anywhere I have AMD or Intel graphics, I use Sway very happily.

clircle 8y ago

Congrats to the sway developers on this milestone. i3 is one of the 'killer apps' of the linux ecosystem and the developers of sway are doing god's work by translating i3 for the wayland compositor. Excited to use this soon if it lands in Debian 10 Buster.

zdragnar 8y ago

Am I seeing this right? Third party screen capture? Practically the only reason I'm still on i3 instead of sway is sharing my screen (as I work from home and do a few video calls a week). edit: spelling. I am apparently terrible at leaving comments from my phone.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
We implemented our half of the equation, but the other half (clients) is still poorly supported. However, you can share Xwayland windows in Chromium.

Symmetry 8y ago

My current setup is to run xmonad as my window manager within an otherwise normal Gnome session. Is there a way to do this with Sway, possibly with some other desktop environment if I had to?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
No, this is not currently possible, but it's something we're working on. It requires buy-in from e.g. Gnome, which is hard to get. KDE is more amenable to this. By the way, check out waymonad, it's based on the same wlroots library as sway: https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

danieldk 8y ago

I am really looking forward to using Sway. I briefly tried the beta and it worked very nicely. However, one problem that prevents me from switching completely is that with 2x scaling, XWayland apps are scaled up from a lower DPI, resulting in very blurry rendering. As far as I understand, this is a problem in XWayland and GNOME uses a hack to make XWayland applications render without scaling (since X11 Qt/Gtk+ applications use their own scaling). But it makes using Firefox et al. way more convenient to use.

naibafo 8y ago
Same for me. Though there is a wayland version of firefox, which I plan on trying out.

red-tea 8y ago

I use i3 currently. I might remove the old nvidia card from my box and purge the nvidia drivers from my system. The Intel graphics will be good enough. I run Gentoo but I don't want my graphical stuff to be high maintenance. Can anyone comment on whether it's worth it to move to wayland/sway?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Whether it's worth it depends on the user. Try it, it's free!

deleted 8y ago

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