5 ms·

Curious, are you on a laptop? If so, how much of a time investment was it to reach the point where you were no longer customising to reach parity with "batteri

Curious, are you on a laptop? If so, how much of a time investment was it to reach the point where you were no longer customising to reach parity with "batteries included" desktop environments (battery bar, sane sleep/wake-ups, volume control)? And how does it handle being plugged/unplugged from external monitors? I have tried to switch to tiling WMs several times, but I have always found myself going back to Gnome as soon as it's a rabbit-hole of config files to do something "simple" like, adjust volume, or organise monitors. That is, features that are quite discoverable in standard DEs.

fuzzy2 5y ago
Haven’t tried multiple monitors or power-saving yet, but in general you can steal from someone’s config on GitHub. Works mostly fine, including battery indicators, brightness, volume control and whatnot. But it definitely requires more tinkering to reach similar levels of, hm, “convenience”.
eterps 5y ago
Manjaro Sway Edition ( https://github.com/Manjaro-Sway/manjaro-sway https://github.com/Manjaro-Sway/manjaro-sway ) has lots of "batteries included".
maxhille 5y ago
Working with sway on a Thinkpad since 2 years now. Stuff like media/brightness buttons and multimonitor setups (now with kanshi) each took a bit of learning/trying but running perfectly now. Since I am using NixOS my config always just improves and will always be available in a Git repo for when I switch to a new machine or finally also change my gaming desktop from Ubuntu to NixOS.
vegai_ 5y ago
On laptop, sometimes attached to a larger screen. I estimate that I've spent 10 hours last year on finding and tinkering the best fit software for my use case. But perhaps we have to consider that I've been using Linux in some form since 1996, so it's very possible that I've grown calluses all over the place. External monitor plugging/unplugging works amazingly well, I'd almost say perfectly. I don't think that it required any configuration from me. I use Displayport over USB-C, and I don't remember it failing ever. Specifically it works much much better than xorg ever did. I have two different Thinkpads: T490 and E14/AMD.
mijoharas 5y ago
sway laptop user here (for almost 2 years I think?). I spent a little while on this, but I migrated from i3, so I just ported every little section of my config bit by bit. In terms of battery bar and other "bar" type things, I use waybar[0] which basically does all the things you'd expect by default (just install and it "works"). For multi-monitor, config, I initially setup with wdisplays[1] (think arandr for wayland) and then manually copied the positions into my sway config. Monitor positioning was the only thing I needed to setup (and telling it that one monitor was HDPI) and then all of the scaling and everything worked perfectly. This was my biggest selling point for wayland, I now get nice crisp fonts and application scaling works nicely (which was not the case with X). volume control from the keyboard took no time, just a couple of extra lines. There was some stuff to do with the clipboard (wl-clipboard[2]) and screenshots (grim[3] + slurp[4]) that required some setup, but again, just a few lines, and didn't take much mental load. Oh and I needed to change my notifications daemon(dunst[5]), and chose to change my program launcher to one with a nicer interface and cleaner fonts (wofi[6]). I think that's all the tweaking that I did. Oh, and I needed to do something with pipewire to sort out screensharing at the start, don't remember that too well though... [0] https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar [1] https://github.com/artizirk/wdisplays https://github.com/artizirk/wdisplays [2] https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard [3] https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim [4] https://github.com/emersion/slurp https://github.com/emersion/slurp [5] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst [6] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi
loudmax 5y ago
Once you start looking into them, "simple" things like adjusting volume and organizing monitors turn out to be more complicated that one would think. Proprietary OSs like MacOS and Windows put enormous effort into hiding these complexities and figuring out sane defaults. They make it look easy, but it's not. Coming from i3, transitioning to Sway was easy. Previously, I'd transferred from Xfce to i3, and more recently I transitioned from ALSA to Pipewire. Each of these transitions took some effort, say an hour or two initially, and then another hour or two spread over a few weeks to work out edge cases. But the thing is, once I've worked out the edge cases, my desktop is rock solid. I don't cringe when I run a system update, I'm confident it will work. And if an update were to cause Sway to break (which hasn't happened to me yet), Sway's internals are accessible enough that I'm confident I'd be able to quickly resolve the issue. This is quite the opposite of my experience with GNOME or KDE. These DEs make an attempt to match the accessibility and intuitiveness of proprietary interfaces, but in my experience they lack the resources. The inherent complexity is papered over and becomes exposed as soon as you try to do something even slightly off the beaten path. And if something does happen to break (which happened to me frequently when running GNOME), fixing the issue is a deep rabbit hole of undocumented or semi-documented options and bugzilla reports. Having said that, I'm open to the notion that one or both of them have improved a lot since then. I really hope they have because running a minimalist desktop like Sway isn't for everyone.

fuzzy2 5y ago

Haven’t tried multiple monitors or power-saving yet, but in general you can steal from someone’s config on GitHub. Works mostly fine, including battery indicators, brightness, volume control and whatnot. But it definitely requires more tinkering to reach similar levels of, hm, “convenience”.

eterps 5y ago

Manjaro Sway Edition ( https://github.com/Manjaro-Sway/manjaro-sway https://github.com/Manjaro-Sway/manjaro-sway ) has lots of "batteries included".

maxhille 5y ago

Working with sway on a Thinkpad since 2 years now. Stuff like media/brightness buttons and multimonitor setups (now with kanshi) each took a bit of learning/trying but running perfectly now. Since I am using NixOS my config always just improves and will always be available in a Git repo for when I switch to a new machine or finally also change my gaming desktop from Ubuntu to NixOS.

vegai_ 5y ago

On laptop, sometimes attached to a larger screen. I estimate that I've spent 10 hours last year on finding and tinkering the best fit software for my use case. But perhaps we have to consider that I've been using Linux in some form since 1996, so it's very possible that I've grown calluses all over the place. External monitor plugging/unplugging works amazingly well, I'd almost say perfectly. I don't think that it required any configuration from me. I use Displayport over USB-C, and I don't remember it failing ever. Specifically it works much much better than xorg ever did. I have two different Thinkpads: T490 and E14/AMD.

mijoharas 5y ago

sway laptop user here (for almost 2 years I think?). I spent a little while on this, but I migrated from i3, so I just ported every little section of my config bit by bit. In terms of battery bar and other "bar" type things, I use waybar[0] which basically does all the things you'd expect by default (just install and it "works"). For multi-monitor, config, I initially setup with wdisplays[1] (think arandr for wayland) and then manually copied the positions into my sway config. Monitor positioning was the only thing I needed to setup (and telling it that one monitor was HDPI) and then all of the scaling and everything worked perfectly. This was my biggest selling point for wayland, I now get nice crisp fonts and application scaling works nicely (which was not the case with X). volume control from the keyboard took no time, just a couple of extra lines. There was some stuff to do with the clipboard (wl-clipboard[2]) and screenshots (grim[3] + slurp[4]) that required some setup, but again, just a few lines, and didn't take much mental load. Oh and I needed to change my notifications daemon(dunst[5]), and chose to change my program launcher to one with a nicer interface and cleaner fonts (wofi[6]). I think that's all the tweaking that I did. Oh, and I needed to do something with pipewire to sort out screensharing at the start, don't remember that too well though... [0] https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar [1] https://github.com/artizirk/wdisplays https://github.com/artizirk/wdisplays [2] https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard [3] https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim [4] https://github.com/emersion/slurp https://github.com/emersion/slurp [5] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst [6] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi

loudmax 5y ago

Once you start looking into them, "simple" things like adjusting volume and organizing monitors turn out to be more complicated that one would think. Proprietary OSs like MacOS and Windows put enormous effort into hiding these complexities and figuring out sane defaults. They make it look easy, but it's not. Coming from i3, transitioning to Sway was easy. Previously, I'd transferred from Xfce to i3, and more recently I transitioned from ALSA to Pipewire. Each of these transitions took some effort, say an hour or two initially, and then another hour or two spread over a few weeks to work out edge cases. But the thing is, once I've worked out the edge cases, my desktop is rock solid. I don't cringe when I run a system update, I'm confident it will work. And if an update were to cause Sway to break (which hasn't happened to me yet), Sway's internals are accessible enough that I'm confident I'd be able to quickly resolve the issue. This is quite the opposite of my experience with GNOME or KDE. These DEs make an attempt to match the accessibility and intuitiveness of proprietary interfaces, but in my experience they lack the resources. The inherent complexity is papered over and becomes exposed as soon as you try to do something even slightly off the beaten path. And if something does happen to break (which happened to me frequently when running GNOME), fixing the issue is a deep rabbit hole of undocumented or semi-documented options and bugzilla reports. Having said that, I'm open to the notion that one or both of them have improved a lot since then. I really hope they have because running a minimalist desktop like Sway isn't for everyone.