The Sway i3-Compatible WM For Wayland Now Supports Tabbed/Stacking Layouts

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Sway i3-Compatible WM For Wayland Now Supports Tabbed/Stacking Layouts

Sway, the i3-compatible tiling window manager for Wayland, is out with a new version...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sway-0.6-Wayland-Released

[vadix]

I've been waiting for this! Very exciting!

[johanb]

0.6 is already in the Arch repos!

Will try on my laptop now, won't be on my desktop until nvidia gets their shit together though.

[rabcor]

Is there any work-ready, stable wayland environment out there that I could use?

[johanb]

Is there any work-ready, stable wayland environment out there that I could use?

Gnome3 and Hawaii desktop are pretty stable.

[paintbynumbers]

Is there any work-ready, stable wayland environment out there that I could use?

I think Gnome 3.20 probably the best for Wayland support right now. For work it's probably fine. Supports pointer confinement for games too but I'm not sure what the support level in libraries like libSDL is for that yet.

[rabcor]

I think Gnome 3.20 probably the best for Wayland support right now. For work it's probably fine. Supports pointer confinement for games too but I'm not sure what the support level in libraries like libSDL is for that yet.

Argh, Gnome (and Ubuntu's unity) is like the one and only DE I can't stand. Hawaii is not 1.0 yet and nowhere claims to be stable yet. I recall trying it a few months ago and it bugged out on me pretty fast (like I wasn't even running any programs on top of it yet)

[tajjada]

I am very happy about this. As an i3 user, I've kept a close eye on the sway project since it started. This was the biggest missing feature preventing me from actually using sway until now. I am looking forward to trying this stuff out, and potentially moving full-time to wayland.

[rabcor]

I am very happy about this. As an i3 user, I've kept a close eye on the sway project since it started. This was the biggest missing feature preventing me from actually using sway until now. I am looking forward to trying this stuff out, and potentially moving full-time to wayland.

Tell us how it goes!

[tajjada]

Tell us how it goes!

I set everything up, gave it a try, and am impressed so far. Pretty much everything that I need works, with some exceptions (see below). I am gradually configuring my system to have everything working in Wayland the way I want. XWayland works well, too, and the overall experience is virtually undistinguishable from i3 on Xorg (as it should be, by design, it would be a sway bug if it wasn't). I can realistically see myself switching to sway full-time very soon.

There were two small (but important to me) missing features which I hadn't thought about before: 1) lack of option to disable mouse acceleration / change mouse accel profile to flat/constant; and 2) lack of option to set monitor refresh rate.

#1 is important to me, because I absolutely despise adaptive mouse acceleration and can't stand it. I want consistent mouse movement. This is something I cannot just deal with, it is a big usability issue. It had to be fixed before I could use sway. I took a brief look at the source code, and figured out it was fairly easy to add a config option for this. I implemented it, and sent a pull request on github. It got merged a few hours later, so this issue is resolved. Yay, I can use sway comfortably now!

#2 is important to me, because I have a 144 Hz monitor, but the default video mode in the driver is 60 Hz, so unless I have the option to change it (which I can do in Xorg using xrandr), I can't use my monitor to its full potential. However, this is not much of an issue for me, and I can just deal with it for now. It seems a lot more complicated to add support for this, compared to the mouse accel stuff, so I haven't bothered to write any code for it (yet, might do at some point if nobody else does it). Everything feels a lot laggier than I am used to, due to the lower framerate, but it's bearable. I don't play games on Linux, so this is not an issue for me. On Windows, where I play my games, I can use my monitor at 144 Hz, and that is what matters.

Another issue in my Wayland experience is that the Gentoo package for Chromium does not give an option to enable the native Wayland support that was added in Chromium 50. I'll have a look and maybe modify the chromium ebuild to add support for it.

There were already unofficial Gentoo ebuilds for sway (and wlc, the library that sway is based on) available, but I didn't like them (due to missing some customisation options), so I wrote my own, and am planning to try to get mine added into the official distro repos. I'll see how that goes.