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Comment by mises | Hacker News Reader

Based on Wayland, meaning it's more modern. Here's what I've heard for benefits:

* Better multi-window and gesture support

* Gaps built in (currently, i3 is separate from i3-gaps, which is what most actually use). No separate forks to deal with, meaning easier maintenance.

* Wallpaper

* Faster

However, there are some big downsides. Wayland is still pretty beta, and not everything works well with it. This is not the fault of Wayland/sway per se, more the fact that everything is based around X11. Biggest thing for me is no copy/paste. Hidpi scaling is supposed to be a nightmare. Also, sway doesn't support Nvidia, and the author has publicly stated he refuses to support any Nvidia drivers (or at least until they're open-source).

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I think you have it backwards with regard to HiDPI. DPI scaling in X is a nightmare. Sway claims to have the best HiDPI support of any desktop environment due to modern Wayland support. Getting X applications to scale with Wayland HiDPI will require workarounds because of the lack of DPI support in X.

In what sense does Wayland have better hidpi support than X?

Mixed DPI works for one. I'm using GNOME on wayland currently but that's really the only thing I've noticed that's better than X.

> lack of DPI support in X

Even back in 2002 RandR supported obtaining screen size information in pixels and millimeters which can be used to calculate DPI... or actually, what people really want when mentioning "DPI support", an automatic way to scale the windows.

How the window scales is up to the toolkit to implement and is independent of window system and really, even independent of screen size/DPI since some users (e.g. due to sight problems) may want their windows to be scaled even on "low DPI" monitors (the whole DPI thing is just a default setting).

The main problem i see with X here isn't some technical inability, but a way for window managers to notify other clients that they should change their scaling (since the window manager is in a better position to know what scaling each window should use - especially when you want different scaling per monitor, which again can be independent of DPI since you may want a large scale for a wall mounted TV even if the DPI would be very low) - essentially something like a new _NET_WM_SCALE window property for EWMH clients and window managers.

As mentioned in the OP, we now have wl-clipboard. :)

Furthermore, it's proprietary NVIDIA drivers Wayland isn't supporting, not NVIDIA itself. AFAIK nouveau works just fine. There are many great reasons for not supporting the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

Noveau sucks, unfortunately. Performance is bad, and you can't load custom firmware like you could with older cards (signing problems). I respect the effort the developers have made; any other driver would be of excellent quality had this much effort been put into it. But Nvidia keeps on being a jerk about it. Easy to say don't support Nvidia, but at the present moment they have the fastest consumer cards on the market.

I run Wayland on my hypervisor OS and pass through my NVIDIA GPU to a VM with proprietary drivers in order to take full advantage of my card.

Do you know of any blog posts that would discuss a setup like this? Sounds pretty interesting.

Alex Williamson has an excellent VFIO blog that discusses the basics of GPU passthru. [0]

I think the instructions are meant for Debian however and there are some differences in the commands you need to run. If you use a Redhat distro and/or you want some further optimization tips I'm also happy to work you through the process.

https://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/05/vfio-gpu-how-to-series-par...

Awesome, thank you!

> at the present moment they have the fastest consumer cards on the market

This is becoming a lot less true. Unless you really want to run the latest games (in which case you'll be on Windows anyway), nvidia is on equal footing as AMD nowadays on Linux. AMD has made a lot of efforts and progress the past few years, and them playing nicely with the OSS community makes a big difference.

My next computer will have an AMD card&processor.

Sway was the reason I chose a Radeon card to my office workstation. Been running Sway from Github since beginning of this year and it is very stable, fast and great experience, supporting my old i3 configuration as-is.

Now I know my next home gaming computer will also have a Radeon card.

P.S. Put a monthly donation for Sway. Really appreciate the work!

I never understood the allure with i3-gaps. Without gaps wallpaper is only relevant for empty workspaces which I dont really use. The no copy and paste is a nonstarter for me.

No copy-paste is a non-starter for me as well, and probably the largest single reason why I still am on i3-gaps. I still like wallpaper mostly because it's nice to add some light transparency to console windows. I3-gaps, for me, was initially because I had a very, very old computer only. This thing had been retired by a corporation three years prior; ancient i3 CPU. With i3-gaps, it ran nice and snappy; on Windows 10, it largely choked. I've appreciated it ever since.

One of the biggest draws is keyboard-friendliness: you don't have to use a mouse to navigate, ever. Nice for those of us who already prefer programs like vim that allow keyboard usage, and can increase productivity. It's also good for multi-window setups (having more than one open), though some people who use tons of windows use bspwm (represents windows with a binary tree).

Vanilla i3 is also keyboard / low resource friendly; for these things i3-gaps is no different than vanilla i3. Having a wallpaper or transparent terminals never did anything for me but maybe become distracting.

Not having to download i3-gaps or feh in exchange for copy/paste and hdpi scaling not working seems like a questionable tradeoff. I'm not sure what 'better multi-window' support means? I've never had issues with i3 windows. Speed has also been non-noticeable.

So it seems like the feature list is 'better gesture support' in exchange for a lot of downsides?

I am not trying to be dismissive, but I see so many people evangelizing it over i3, I feel like I have to be missing something. I can't believe there's a single person who finds those tradeoffs acceptable outside of those who want it to be good eventually and are working towards that.

Again, this is what I've heard; never used it myself (mostly because of the issues you mentioned; I'm unwilling to give up copy-paste and hidpi). With that said, X11 is quite arcane. I3 is still good, or at least for me. Not going to try to proselytize here. I mostly switched because I had to use a completely ancient computer for a while, and I needed to use a tiling wm to get decent responsiveness.

HiDPI scaling is actually much better on Wayland than on X11. On X, if the app doesn't support HiDPI, the compositor cannot scale the window because it cannot scale input. On wayland, this is possible. Wayland also supports mixed-DPI multimonitor support. On weston, window dragging between mixed DPI monitors is seamless.

I've always wondered what's the use of gaps.

Twofold: for many, it just looks nice. But for me, having a little margin in between things helps me visually distinguish and makes it easier to look quickly at different windows. This is actually helped with a wallpaper, because it further accentuates the borders of windows. I guess a magenta outline on every window would technically serve the same purpose (the sort of thing you might see on a high-contrast UI), but it's a little less gaudy and a little more visually appealing this way.

I use a subtle (~20%) transparency on inactive windows for that (though with XMonad, not Sway). It helps distinguish windows, lets me see which window is active without having to look for the border, and wastes less space compared to either borders or gaps.

The desktop number 5 with cmus, alsamixer and a terminal music visualizer with gaps and transparency for eye candy.

Not everything needs to have a real use case!

What does better gesture support mean in this case? libinput works with X too and it can be used to enable some kinds of touchpad gestures there

Xorg usually ships with a different input driver, IIRC. Libinput is the default in Wayland and works seamlessly; Xorg actually needs a wrapper (xf86-input-libinput). Haven't personally used it, just what I've heard.

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