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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, nice to see some more practical examples.

For those unaware, SirCmpwn is responsible for sway - https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway - which aims to be an i3 compatible compositor for Wayland. In my experience it's not production ready yet, but it's definitely a pretty cool project to keep an eye on if you do use i3.

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Out of curiosity, when was your last exposure to Sway? Many people use it as their daily driver and would agree that it's production ready (even if it's not done). Can you report any bugs you find?

The most annoying thing is the mouse lag and higher resource utilization compared to i3.

Aside from that, it's great though. I used it for a month before going back to i3, you've really put a good amount of work into the project.

That's fair, it definitely has inferior performance.

What are the reasons? Is there any problem that cannot be solved?

A lot of it comes down to the choice to use wlc[1], a library that provides some of the low-level plumbing for Sway. It was great for getting Sway up and running quickly, but it's not very flexible for the directions we want to go. Most of Sway's performance issues are due to WLC or decisions Sway had to make to accomodate WLC.

Currently most of the work on Sway is being done on wlroots[2], with the goal of replacing wlc. The design is much more flexible and should have better performance and should avoid imposing constraints on Sway that impact its performance. A lot of Sway features are also currently blocked by wlroots, since wlc isn't flexible enough to allow us to implement them. I'm actually lucky enough to be working on wlroots full time at the moment, thanks to a generous commercial sponsor[3], along with some support from Patreon[4]. The future is definitely bright for Sway :)

[1] https://github.com/Cloudef/wlc [2] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/wlroots [3] https://nyantec.com/ [4] https://www.patreon.com/sircmpwn

Not OP but I'm using sway when I'm on Linux, too. The only annoying thing is, that the mouse cursor is laggy when the system is under load. Apart from that I think it is pretty good! A systray would be nice of course but that is not a deal breaker. Thanks for the amazing work!

>A systray would be nice of course but that is not a deal breaker.

You can actually expect that to ship in the upcoming release :)

You've just made my day :D

I spent some time recently trying it on my XPS 13 and I noticed that the mouse would freeze sometimes as well. Also there are some weird glitches when using apps like Steam, but that's not a major issue really.

Probably the two things (which aren't sway issues) that kept me from continuing to use it are that wayland doesn't work properly with Synergy (which I use a lot) and I'm not an i3 user and I'm a lot more comfortable and familiar with XMonad but I'm sure I could configure it to my taste given enough free time.

Last I saw, it broke when trying to use multiple monitors. This was a few months ago, 3 monitors, Fedora 25 I think.

Please come around the IRC channel and ask for support or report the problems you encounter on GitHub. Multiple monitors should be totally stable.

I used Sway for a while, and remember it being pretty stable.

I switched from Wayland back to X due to bugs in other applications, such as Firefox.

A few months back, and then again today.

> Can you report any bugs you find? Perhaps, but I'm not convinced they're bugs in your code.

When I said it wasn't production ready, I was referring to the ecosystem (using xwayland, GTK apps etc). In my experience this isn't quite as good. As an example: searching in Firefox is glitchy (dropdown menu), resizing apps (even apps such as urxvt) in Sway is a bit glitchy during the resize etc. I'm not sure how many of these things have been reported. The default mouse wheel speed and mouse speed seems to be odd, I think I need to read up on the documentation to fix this.

Thanks for clarifying, that makes sense! Those Sway issues are known, but no one really thinks they're dealbreakers.

Another interesting Wayland project (window manager):

https://github.com/way-cooler/way-cooler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14534295

There's also the full fledged OS/Desktop Environment called Liri https://liri.io that was a pivot from papyrus using Wayland.

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