Once you start looking into them, "simple" things like adjusting volume and organizing monitors turn out to be more complicated that one would think. Proprieta

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.