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?
Hyprland is awesome, just follow the wiki and you’ll be golden
Sway is a great manual tiler and I’ve had no issues with it for years. Sadly it doesn’t have animations, since the devs don’t want to add features not in i3. Imo this limits its potential, because even i3 supports animations through external compositors like picom.
river has imo the best (dynamic) tiling, but it has seperate workspaces for each monitor, instead of a single set moveable between monitors.
Hyprland supports manual and dynamic tiling, and almost any other configuration I can imagine. My hyprland keybindings are basically a copy of rivers default. Having hundreds of options available makes it a bit difficult to find the correct ones at first, but once it’s done it’s done (and hopefully version controlled/backed up with git).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 dosudo -u user2 firefox
as user1, in wayland you can’t, even if a seatd is running for that other user as well.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.
I would recommend trying out first sway just because the configuration is very straightforward and you easily find on the internet configuration files of other people, most of the setup is already done for you out of the box as well.
After getting used to sway I would then recommend moving into WMs that require more tinkering, like hyperland you mention on the post.
Also if you ended up removing animations and don’t really care that much, you might want to try other projects that have different focuses such as the minimalism of dwl or the different approach of tilling with tags with river (it all ends up on preference after getting used to this kinda of graphical servers)
Edit: FYI, most of the ricing (aesthetics) tends to come from the status bar you choose, the colors you choose to configure on files and the background image (I would say background img being the most important cause everything is built around it (colors, themeing, etc) )
Hyprland provided you’re not on Nvidia
I use it on Nvidia on both of my machines and it’s not exactly what I’d call stable, recently updated my system and both of my machines broke in some way
Laptop can’t launch VScode now, desktop gets jitters when running certain games
That said the latter was an Nvidia driver regression that I believe has a fix in the works now
It’s crazy how far this extends. I have fewer problems on my 5k atom series laptop GPU/CPU after fooling with a few of the settings than with an nvidia 2k card.
No issues with either full Intel or amd stacks a decade old.
Sway and hyprland are going to be the main recommendations, especially hyprland because it is pretty feature-rich. I personally have been using River for the last few months, which I’ve been able to completely replicate my five year old bspwm set up with using the rivercarro layout. It’s not as popular, but I’ve really liked it so far.
Another river user here. I like river, but I wouldn’t recommend it (for someone who’s never used a tiler). It feels a bit bare bones and there’s not that much development going on (still active, but not frequent updates).
Both Sway and Hyprland are probably good picks. You can always switch to a different one, if your first choice doesn’t satisfy you.
Thanks for your opinion! :)
Yeah, I’ve searched for river a bit, but there’s not much content out there.
For the start, I wanna stick to something more popular.
I think Hyprland has a bigger user base.Sway looks a bit barebones/ old fashioned due to lack of animations.
Don’t get me wrong, it certainly is “the default” and “ol’ reliable”, but it seems to be very limited, due to the constraint of just replacing i3.
Stuff like smooth animations, dynamic tiling, and more, sound a bit needless for many, but for me, looks and smoothness is very important.
I will try Hyprland in a VM first and then look for a pre-made uBlue-image or try installing it in Distrobox/ Nix.I think it is Hyprland that is the outlier in being animated by default, rather than sway being especially barebones. Compared to popular WMs on X11, sway is not minimal. Compare to dwm and bspwm for example, both of which are pretty popular yet more minimal than sway.
I think you have to just try and find your favorite.
Live boot Manjaro Sway to see how the bestly configured Sway works. If you like Suckless appoach, then try dwl.
I never tried Hyprland but I recommend to try it.
Harder task is the bar. Yambar and Waybar are both hard to configure compared to dwm statusbar.
I also have to add that I’m no IT-guy. I’m pretty much only a tech-enthusiastic normie who likes Linux and tries a lot.
I don’t have any experience in coding and think I will mainly use the templates (dotfiles, bars, search box, etc.) from others, at least for the start.What do you like about the Manjaro-Sway? What does it differently than other implementations?
I will definitely give it a try to test it out and then try to replicate it in Fedora. Thanks!The suckless software is a big no for me. It might be good for some people, but I heard most of it is hard to configure (at least for a noob like myself) and comes very …minimalist… out of the box.
I don’t like the suckless philosophy for my use case, I want “bloat”, as weird as it sounds. I don’t want or need a super minimalist system, I want it comfortable and everything working out of the box.Manjaro Sway ships with eyecandy and a lots of very useful functionality. The background even includes the default keybinds.
Suckless approach is IMO way more easier than Sway. What helps a lot is that you write an alias which compiles your new config and then reloads the WM. It requires the reload patch + just few another to make it useful.
The thing about bloated means usually you have festures you never use and you still need to learn the way other people did for you. When you start building it from bare minimum you add only the configurations you need and then it is much easier to remembee how they work. That’s why I never tried Hyprland.
Tried PaperWM? https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM it’s like forge, an extension to gnome
Yeah, I tried it, but it didn’t feel like I wanted continue using it.
Wasn’t that the “continuous notebook” workflow?If yes, then it altered the stock workflow too much for me and felt a bit janky. The main reason for me to use Forge is that it only changes the floating windows into tiling ones, and I feel like that’s how Gnome was supposed to be somehow.
But I can take a look again at PaperWM, thanks!
There is also Niri, a compositor that is inspired by PaperWM
The current v0.1.0-beta looks very good. I only wish it came with a bar itself instead of relying on external programs like swaybar, or at least a working preconfiguration for swaybar that fits to most of the gnome-apps regarding the look and feel.
I used PaperWM a lot, but then it broke too often with every Gnome release. I havn’t looked into the latest PaperWM. This Niri looks more promising and seems to have the basics sorted out. I have to give it a try despite the additional time needed to configure swaybar.
Qtile… the default bar is really nice to use and if you know a little python every aspect of the WM is easy to hack around in. Docs are great too.
I use Sway to great success. Gnome extensions are quite limited. Hyprland seems ok but the time that i was trying to use it (several months back) it had severe issues in release and trunk revisions. Specially with multimonitor setup, like the screen locker that they recommend in documentation is crashing after sleep if on multimonitor setup, i lost trust in Hyprland after that security issue.
ive heard reallygood things about hyperland + its docs !
personally, i use qtile cuz its config is in python with p managable docs, and it comes with its own barebones bar + launcher!
although on my main i do have plasma n bismuth, but thats not for serious twm stuff dp ymmv there
KDE with a plugin
I also tried that too. Bismuth and all the other ones.
There were some that were actually okay tbh, but they are still janky, like they aren’t supposed to exist. In that regard, KDE (Kwin) is even worse than Gnome (Mutter), at least bug wise and in my own experience.
They all felt like I am using a tractor to drive to work. They work, yes, but I think I will get a better experience on something that was designed from the ground up to work like that.
I wanna let floating WMs do their thing, and tiling WMs do theirs.Edit: The best one was Polonium, but it was very buggy and I couldn’t even close or move windows graphically. The documentation didn’t help too.
I use hyprland, but I’m not a fan of the community of edgelording weebs
Each to their own. I’m not too, I prefer simple and clean setups.
But if one likes to stare at neon colored anime tiddies for 10 h a day straight, go for it bro ✌️
Since you’re on GNOME you can try pop-shell it’s the same tilling GNONE extension PopOS uses and it’s out for GNOME 45 too.
I personally use Forge, which does the same. It seems better supported, since the pop-shell will probably be abandoned when Cosmic releases
OP posts about how they’re annoyed with low effort “I deleted windows” posts, makes a low effort “recommend me a wm” post. You can’t make this shit up…
Try them out, find out what you like, ask specific questions when you get stuck on something.
