3 ms·

I've been using sway a few years already: first in the office workstation with AMD card with Arch, then on my home ThinkPad T25 on NixOS and again on my hobby/t

by pimeys 6y ago

I've been using sway a few years already: first in the office workstation with AMD card with Arch, then on my home ThinkPad T25 on NixOS and again on my hobby/travel ThinkPad X230 on FreeBSD that works so smooth and fast now. What's left on xorg/i3 is the workstation with an nvidia GPU, that'll be replaced to an AMD card when the prices come down a bit. I'm super happy with sway. It's adding all i3 patches into one coherent setup. The community is friendly and helpful and the desktop super snappy and pleasure to use from old laptops to extremely fast workstations. Thank you for the developers and community. Edit: dotfiles here https://github.com/pimeys/nixos https://github.com/pimeys/nixos

rowanG077 6y ago
I'm using nixos with i3 and picom. Is sway with wayland really that much better? What day to day thing would I notice?
- pimeys 6y ago
  It works the same. What I like in sway is it's basically i3 AND i3-gaps together in an active codebase. The biggest difference you notice is when you get rid of picom the compositor, you'll get visibly snappier desktop... Without really needing any special xorg configuration or picom setup, you get composition, tear-free graphics and videos, all just working. Be aware that to get there, you should make sure you run all your apps in wayland too, not in xwayland. Firefox requires an env var, same goes with GTK and QT apps. Emacs you get from the NixOS overlay; there's a branch that follows the pure gtk build, that doesn't need xwayland. Electron is still xwayland only for most apps. I'm eagerly waiting at least for slack and element to upgrade to Electron 12, which will bring native wayland support. And there's a nice ecosystem building around wlroots and sway, great tools to choose from for your desktop needs, such as waybar, wofi, wf-recorder and greetd. Of course you don't NEED any of this. But if I would think like this, I'd probably just used a macOS machine with default settings anyhoo.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    Sounds good! I just checked around a little bit and the only program I really would like to have wayland support is vscode and that seems to be around the corner. So I will wait for that and then try it out. Thanks for explaining!

by pimeys 6y ago

rowanG077 6y ago

I'm using nixos with i3 and picom. Is sway with wayland really that much better? What day to day thing would I notice?

pimeys 6y ago
It works the same. What I like in sway is it's basically i3 AND i3-gaps together in an active codebase. The biggest difference you notice is when you get rid of picom the compositor, you'll get visibly snappier desktop... Without really needing any special xorg configuration or picom setup, you get composition, tear-free graphics and videos, all just working. Be aware that to get there, you should make sure you run all your apps in wayland too, not in xwayland. Firefox requires an env var, same goes with GTK and QT apps. Emacs you get from the NixOS overlay; there's a branch that follows the pure gtk build, that doesn't need xwayland. Electron is still xwayland only for most apps. I'm eagerly waiting at least for slack and element to upgrade to Electron 12, which will bring native wayland support. And there's a nice ecosystem building around wlroots and sway, great tools to choose from for your desktop needs, such as waybar, wofi, wf-recorder and greetd. Of course you don't NEED any of this. But if I would think like this, I'd probably just used a macOS machine with default settings anyhoo.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  Sounds good! I just checked around a little bit and the only program I really would like to have wayland support is vscode and that seems to be around the corner. So I will wait for that and then try it out. Thanks for explaining!