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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

I had to look it up but if anyone is curious, Sway is a Wayland-based drop in replacement for i3, a tiling window manager.

I always wanted to get in to i3, but traditional window managers seem to work better with my brain.

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> traditional window managers seem to work better with my brain.

My final push came from Gnome (on X11) randomly messing up Alt+Tab so that each time it would start cycling from an arbitrary window rather than the current one, only fixable by logging out and logging in again. Also annoying: with an external monitor, windows sometimes jump between monitors after suspend and resume for no clear reason.

No such issues with Sway at all. Overall, I found the switch very worthwhile.

Suspend/Sleep/Hibernation have always been jank, all bets are off if you dare use them.

Just idle or shut it down like a sane man.

I have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon running Ubuntu LTS that sleeps beautifully when I close the lid.

This replaced years of Dell and Asus models that kept trying to commit thermal suicide in my bag.

I’m only talking about window management getting messed up, not power management. My windows always go back to the correct position on the correct monitor with Sway. This was not the case with Gnome on X.

Although my experience also matches sibling’s when it comes to power management.

My experience is that if I dare to use Suspend/Sleep/Hibernation, everything janks up. Power management, window management, network management, anything and everything.

It's why I always either just idle or shut down if I'm not using a desktop/laptop, depending on the expected downtime. I'm going to hard reboot anyway because of how janked up everything would otherwise be, so I might as well save myself the "fast" boot up cycle that just wastes my time.

That must be very frustrating. I’m sure you’ve already tried to track down the culprit and it was in vain.

All I can say is that the ThinkPad + Sway combination seems solid even with suspend. I’m hoping you’ll find a fix too.

Well, my fix has been to disregard their very existence since it's clearly not worth my time.

Especially nowadays where computers boot off of SSDs, a full cold boot doesn't take more than several seconds anyway. There certainly was an argument back in ye olde HDD days.

That depends on your hardware; generations of thinkpads have Just Worked, and the best sleep I've ever seen was Linux on some random Lenovo laptop (it slept properly, and could wake faster than I opened the lid).

Did you try restarting GNOME (alt+f2, r in the prompt. doesn't close applications) when you had that alt-tab bug? One of the things that keeps me on x11 is gnome bugging out after running for a few days which restarting fixes, but gnome under wayland can't be restarted like that without logging out.

I think I tried and that didn’t fix the Alt+Tab problem for me. The daunting thing about it was that I don’t even know where to begin to track down the cause, and it’s hard to file a bug report because it’s a heisenbug that takes weeks for me to come up.

Does Gnome give you similar bugs on Wayland too?

I've gotten alt-tab weirdness under both. (I use wayland on one machine, and x11 on another) They both seem to have different sets of issues, and I don't think one stands out as much less buggy. Part of my problem might be the many extensions I have installed though.

Count me in with the group that’s not been able to find the appeal in tiling WMs. For more automatic setups I find myself “fighting” them a lot, and for manual setups I’m micromanaging windows much more than I do with a typical floating WM.

My preferred setup is a floating WM with dual monitors, with each monitor’s virtual desktops being fully independent (so switching one doesn’t switch the other), which allows using the desktops to create “windowsets” that can quickly be switched between. This is by far the least micro-managey arrangment I’ve used, with windows rarely being moved or resized once set up. Practically zero mental overhead, it’s very nice.

After trying a few tiling window managers (including over a year with i3wm), I got xmonad to be the least amount of work/thinking to use.

Same, which is one reason I'm dreading the eventual Xpocalypse, as I have not found a drop-in replacement for Xmonad in the Wayland universe. (Particularly, the way Xmonad deals with multiple monitors and desktops just makes sense to me.)

You can get very close to the Xmonad experience with Qtile. It's the most flexible tiling WM in terms of tiling modes, I believe.

Python config and runs under either X11 or Wayland.

https://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...

The high learning curve for tiling window managers is definitely worth the effort in the end. I'm a sway user, used to be an i3 user, and will never return to GNOME or KDE Plasma Workspaces.

I'd add that it's way easier if you already have a hotkey mindset. Basically if someone is part of the cult of vim they will probably do just fine with a tiler, otherwise there will be a bit of a struggle.

I use sway. Virtual desktop per application. Replace file manager with terminal. Use tmux. Use vim

Tiling window managers are a different way of thinking about how one uses a computer, similar to how different touch interfaces are, but in the other more keyboardly direction.

I find I reach for a tiling WM (or tmux) when I have a lot of terminal tasks I need to do and being able to quickly summon, dismiss and rearrange windows visibly is more important than their placement.

As with everything else, everyone has their preferences and each paradigm has its strengths, weaknesses and natural use cases.

See 3mux for terminal i3 like tiling https://github.com/aaronjanse/3mux

> Tiling window managers are a different way of thinking about how one uses a computer, similar to how different touch interfaces are, but in the other more keyboardly direction.

Tiling windows and touch interactions work great together, if the system is set up to things like snap to fit. Current day tablets & many phones do limited forms of tiling, because it is the better fit. Managing floating windows on a touch-only system (like a tablet) is the worst combo.

You can also go middleground and for example for GNOME use one of several tiling extensions. I use Forge and its working great.

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