I’m interested in TWMs for some while now.
Currently, I’m running Gnome with the Forge extension, which gives me a quite nice tiling with the full fledged DE experience I need.

Especially Hyprland is the project I have an eye on the most. The ultra-smooth animations are just out of this world! (I’m not only locked on Hyprland tho.)

My current setup feels a bit clunky, and I want something proper, without losing the comfort of a fully functioning DE.
My end goal maybe would be making my own uBlue-image with a setup that works sane out of the box.

Are there any setups and recommendations of needed packages?

How do Sway, Hyprland and other TWMs differ from each other?
Which one would you recommend for starters, and which one is “the best”?

What do I need to know before getting started? Should I just dive into it head first?

If I have to ask all these questions, would you just say I should ditch the idea for now, with my current level of knowledge and time?

What has your experience been? Any problems I may encounter?

Thank you for your answers?

  • @Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
    4•5 months ago

    Is there a fork of Sway, that is more future oriented and wants to break that original idea of just replacing i3?
    I’ve heard something of SwayFX. Is it something like that?

    I think I will just try many different ones with someone else’s customisation in a VM and see what I like.

    • Chewy
      2•5 months ago

      I’ve never tried SwayFX, as animations aren’t really important for me (altough I currently use them (sped up) on hyprland).

      Edit: Remember that almost all apps/bars/launcher available in those preconfigurations also work on other compositors. I personally recommend to make note which tools you like and assemble them to a desktop you like on any compositors. E.g. my desktop looks and works nearly identical on Sway and Hyprland.

      • callyral [he/they]English
        2•5 months ago

        animations aren’t really important for me

        I don’t think SwayFX has animations yet, it’s on the roadmap but for now it’s window blur, rounded corners, etc.

        • Chewy
          1•5 months ago

          Thanks, I forgot rounded corners and window blur are also not supported by Sway. Especially blur does have it’s non-cosmetic use cases, so maybe it’ll just take a decade until they accept a contribution. i3 also didn’t include the i3-gaps patches for many years.

          I do appreciate how quick navigation on sway is without unnecessary delays through animations. But especially for touchpad gestures animations are sorely lacking. Switching between workspaces with 1:1 gestures feels awesome and the main reason for me trying hyprland, besides dynamic tiling.

          • yianiris
            1•5 months ago

            labwc is amazing too, try it.
            The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to run a graphic application as one user from another.
            In X you simply do

            sudo -u user2 firefox
            as user1, in wayland you can’t, even if a seatd is running for that other user as well.

            @Chewy7324 @callyral

            • Chewy
              1•5 months ago

              It’s great to see a Wayland window-stacking compositor to cater to those who like Openbox, altough personally prefer tiling wms.

              Why do you want to run an application as another user on the same OS? My only guess would be for isolation through seperate home directories, because with X they could still log keys, so it’s not enough for proper sandboxing.

              It might be possible to (mis)use waypipe for this purpose, altough I don’t know good the performance would be compared to direct rendering.