My biggest issue with Wayland is how it makes window managers a thing of the past.
i3, xmonad, elightenment, ctwm, WindowMaker and dozens of others appeared only because X made it easy.
Wayland makes developing window managers difficult again.
i3, xmonad, elightenment, ctwm, WindowMaker and dozens of others appeared only because X made it easy.
Wayland makes developing window managers difficult again.
It has its own libraries for things like screensharing (xdg-desktop-portal-wlr) that should work across these window-manager-esque desktops.
WayFire makes wlroots a bit easier but I find it quite messy/not clear (but it's very powerful & flexible).
There's definitively the need for an easy high level API for wlroots (the main wlroots dev started working on a high level scene tree API some times ago but it now seems kinda abandoned)
The Sway devs maintain a list of common helper applications that work with Sway: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide
Creating a user service per single line exec foo is extra ceremony.
I have nvidia hardware so sway makes no sense for me to use.
Also it's developer is extremely abrasive.
Furthermore a lot on that list isn't an even trade.
ydotool is a poor unmaintained replacement, making your own custom layout is a lot more work than xmodmap.
On net if you don't have mixed dpi so far as I can see you aren't actually gaining anything.
The best sales pitches I've seen are almost as good as what you already have but on wayland.
Is there anyway that sway does better than i3?
Then go with the parent post's other suggestion: a simple startup script that ends with launching Sway.
> I have nvidia hardware so sway makes no sense for me to use.
I mean the fact that Nvidia refuses to play by the rules, making their hardware unusable with Wayland, is a well-established thing by now.
> Also it's developer is extremely abrasive.
Is he? He has strong opinions and doesn't beat around the bush, but does that really matter unless you yourself actually want to develop Sway?
> Is there anyway that sway does better than i3?
I actually haven't tried i3, but on the face of it I would say that it's an advantage of Sway that it can run without the gigantic and increasingly unmaintainable legacy system that is X. You can certainly run X without problems today, but isn't it widely agreed that X doesn't exactly have a bright future? Sway is not tied to X's future.
No user on earth cares any more than they care about the sharpness of the blades used to grind the sausage they ate for breakfast.
I'm not sure why you imagine that nvidia is obligated to support Linux in the fashion you would prefer. I bought the hardware based on the existing drivers working well under Linux and windows not love for them or idealogy. This is why most people buy things.
X11s future departure seems like a thin justification seeing as it's future seems pretty secure for the next decade. Maybe by 2030 there will be a compelling case for switching plus hopefully the kinks will have been worked out courtesy of folks like yourself.
OK, let me rephrase it: a feature it has over i3 is a higher probability of running on the platform provided by most distros in 5 years' time.
> No user on earth cares any more than they care about the sharpness of the blades used to grind the sausage they ate for breakfast.
Indeed. But if you're choosing a sausage you wanna have for breakfast for the next few years, you might choose better than the one made from the animal that people fear might go extinct.
> I'm not sure why you imagine that nvidia is obligated to support Linux in the fashion you would prefer.
Oh not the fashion I prefer. The fashion the Linux developers prefer. Most other providers of hardware seem to. What makes Nvidia special?
> X11s future departure seems like a thin justification seeing as it's future seems pretty secure for the next decade.
Perhaps. You may well be proven right, but I wouldn't bet that X11 is able to attract sufficient manpower to keep up going forward. Time will tell.
I'm not trying to convert you. I'm trying to give one argument why Sway might offer something that i3 doesn't.
No word on whether red hat will be able to get rid of x11 by 2023/4 or whenever the next major release is and end up supporting it until 2036ish.
You had to use xlib to access X11 too.
(and bunch of others if you wanted nice things like font scaling, clipboard etc.)
And people will probably write other libs. If nothing else I expect ... but in rust and goloang variants.
That's subjective. There are compositor libraries. It shouldn't be more difficult.