Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnsaff2 | Hacker News Reader

I've been a sway/i3 user for almost 10 years and when I tried to switch to Hyprland I ended up with the realization that once I had replicated my sway config there was no advantage over sway that I could think of.

This obviously has a strong habit and comfort aspect and should not discourage anyone trying Hyprland, especially if they are new to tiling WM's.

The exercise itself was not useless, following various Hyprland guides I picked up tools here and there that I had not been aware of that I integrated into my sway flow.

View on HN

Agreed I also use sway since a few years and i3 before. The switch from i3 to sway was painless, and I really felt the benefits of wayland.

But a few months ago I also replicated my sway config to hyprland, as I heard many good things about it, and it seemed like it was the new "cool kid".

But I also didn't notice any benefit.

On the contrary, I've had more problems with it, frequent crashes, flickering windows. And It misses a way to move a whole workspace to another monitor. Nonetheless I used it for ~1 month, and then switched back to sway.

Switching back to sway really felt like an improvement.

Even if they'd fix all the issues I had, I still can't see what hyprland has to offer for me, that sway can not. (Except the animations, which I immediately turned off)

For me Hyprland offers the ability to share a specific window or region whereas Sway could only do the entire monitor. As I have an ultra widescreen monitor sharing a specific window or region is pretty important to me but I can see why others may have other priorities. I do still prefer the tiling layout of Sway over Hyprland though so probably would jump back if Sway/wlroots improve their screensharing support.

I honestly haven't read anything about sway. I didn't give much context, but the reason I moved to hyprland was because with plasma 6 my workflow basically died, with all my kwin scripts suddenly becoming useless.

I asked where I work and many recommended hyprland. After giving it a try I saw it was actually very good.

What do you like about sway and what advantages did you hope that hyprland had over sway for you to be compelled to move to it?

If you don't mind me replying in place of the orginal poster:

Sway is just i3 for Wayland, which in turn means you have multiple workspaces (which are also potentially mapped to multiple monitors). You assign workspace a label (number, or text, or emoji), and you may also bind some application to always open on that workspace. Or you just get a habit of putting specific applications to only specific workspaces. Your entire navigation then sits in your muscle memory - finger on the mod key (win or alt or ctrl - whatever), another finger on the digits row for the workspace index - and you're there.

It's a tiling WM, so you don't spend time arranging windows - they already take the full desktop real estate evenly split between them, and you can also adjust size of each window separately. Again, this sits in your muscle memory.

Point is - no mouse is needed to navigate through workspaces and windows.

You may read my blog post about setting sway up (on NixOS) here:

https://drakerossman.com/blog/wayland-on-nixos-confusion-con...

Thanks for that blog post! I have been meaning to tip my toes into nix for a while now, this might actually push me to it. How long have you been using nix for? How do you like it?

Something like for 3 years. Absolutely fascinated by it. Writing a book about it too: https://drakerossman.com/blog/practical-nixos-the-book

Also check the "nix" tag at blog.

Hyprland has: - Xwayland no scale so your apps don't turn into a blurry mess if you use scaling - Fancy animations

However, it also seems rather unstable. Over the past several months I've been using it, it had a few separate bugs that led to crashes. I haven't really used Sway, so I can't really comment on that, but the X11 WMs (i3 and bspwm) are both quite stable and I honestly can't recall them crashing.

That is really disappointing to hear. It's depressing how many projects don't have a commitment to backward compatibility.

I tried Hyprland from Sway, and my takeaway was that I liked auto tiling more than manual. Didn’t much care for all the extras though, so I actually moved to, and still use, River.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com