 So my last little mini review of a window manager was Qtile and I still have one or two Qtile videos that I want to do But that's for later in the month I've moved on now to a new window manager and I've been using it now for a few days that window manager is Sway WM Now I took this as a challenge from one of my supporters and I want to say thank you Josh for supporting me and sponsoring this challenge, but Also, thank you Josh Okay, so I've been using Sway window manager for a few days about a week off and on Mostly in the last two or three days have I really gotten into it and I have some thoughts. These are my initial impressions I'm going to be using this for at least a month and I'll probably make two or three videos on it during that time period So just to start off with some initial impressions I'm going to do this in two different sections the first I'm going to be talking about my impressions of Sway itself and then I'm going to be talking a little bit about Wayland because Sway is at its heart a Wayland compositor or Wayland window manager However, you want to say it now there are some things that I'm going to say right off the top here I do not have my terminology down correctly quite yet There are some things that I'm still trying to get into my head because there are differences when it comes to What I'm used to so for example, I'm used to you know X 11 or X or being a display server Wayland is Kind of analogous to that but it has several different parts to it and I'm still learning those things So let's go ahead and first start off with my impressions of Sway So let me show you what my Sway window manager looks like right now This is what mine looks like right now and I haven't done too much to it over the last Week or so I've been trying to use it as stock as possible outside of the bar But for the most part even the bar is as stock as it comes because this is Way bar And it's the one that they recommend that you use it's Kind of like poly bar. I'll talk about that later So basically I've just been using Sway in its stock configuration as much as possible I've changed a few key bindings that I'm more familiar with so for example I've changed the kill window to Mod Q instead of Mod plus C or maybe Mod plus Q I can't remember. What's the default one was but it was Mod shift Q though So I've changed things like that and I've changed the wallpaper. So I if I show you the wallpaper This is what you know, I've changed the wallpaper I had to learn how to change the wallpaper because it's not the same process It's a little bit different you can do it in a couple different ways you can Use a program like I am V to change the wallpaper Which is what I ended up doing or you can actually just provide a path to Your specific wallpaper in the configuration file It's kind of the ability just to set your wallpaper directly in the configuration file Where's an I3 you need a program to do it like Faye or You know nitrogen or something like that with I3 you can just use the output command Which is really kind of nice. So there are a couple things that I need to talk about when it comes to Sway itself that are a little bit confusing So if you go to the Sway website You'll see that they claim that the configuration for sway is a one-to-one or at least almost one-to-one Replacement for I3 so you're supposedly be able to take an I3 configuration file and drop it into your sway configuration file And it will just work. This is almost true and when I say it's almost true It it really does work for the most part, but there's a few things that just don't work So first off there are still some old rules that I use in my I3 config that are depreciated That one of them is the one that removes the title bar at the top of the windows There's a new way of doing that. I haven't switched over to it in my new I3 configuration file yet So when I switched to move to my I3 config over to Sway, I got an error So that was one way that it wasn't a one-to-one drop in replacement another one and it's a bigger one is Scratch pads. So if I search for scratch pads here the base level scratch pad functionality from I3 to Sway would probably work if all you do is Move a window that you spawn Manually to a scratch pad and then try to bring it back That's fine But that's not the way that I have my scratch pads working instead I have my scratch pads spawn at startup and are hidden So they are automatically in the scratch pad space that doesn't particularly work They do spawn at startup, but they won't stay hidden and they won't stay centered at start Up. It's a little weird. I haven't figured out the reason why that's the case yet Apparently the way centering works in Sway is a little bit different than the way it is in I3 I haven't figured out that difference yet That's something that I'm gonna have to work on another thing is it doesn't seem to want to start up a window Inside of the scratch pad space. It just starts it up as a window on your you know, like a visible window So I'm not sure Again why that is But it's definitely different than I3 which seems to work just fine So that's those are two differences or two things that were hurdles to moving an I3 Configuration file to Sway for the most part though all of the configuration Syntax and stuff like that is mostly the same. So if you've configured I3 before configuring Sway is going to be mostly the same and It was not hard. So I've just kind of switched back to the default Sway configuration file for now and abandoned mine because mine has a whole bunch of scratch pads and stuff like that and I don't have the regular keybindings in my I3 config all of my I3 Configuration keybindings and stuff that move windows around move between workspaces all that stuff is in SXHKD and SXHKD does not work in Sway so I wasn't able to really use my configuration because I don't have any of this stuff inside of my Configuration file so I would have to take all this stuff out put it in my configuration file at that point I might as well just use the default configuration and kind of go on from here So that's what I plan on doing my initial impressions my initial thoughts on Sway is that it works basically like I3 and The one-to-one comparison between I3 and Sway is pretty good the way you work with windows is Exactly the same moving between different layouts is exactly the same So you can do mod V and then you can change the direction the windows spawn Things like that if you've used I3 using Sway is pretty much the same where that Changes is with the bar. So I'm not actually sure what the default bar looks like I never actually used it because they tell you to use way bar in the configuration documentation So I immediately enabled way bar. So you enable way bar just by installing way bar obviously and then in the bar section at the bottom you do this Sway bar underscore command way bar and way bar is what you see at the top now way bar is kind of like poly bar and It's a very loose comparison. So Poly bar is very easy to configure. It's a very much an I3 like configuration file It's a user readable configuration file if I were to show you the way bar configuration file It looks like this and as you can see this is not a user readable configuration file It's not hard once you kind of get used to it, but there's random things in here. That's a little bit weird So for example comments are two backslashes and that takes some getting used to also everything's in quotation marks and I mean everything is in quotation marks even like the first part of the Setting thing is in quotation marks and then the second part is in quotation marks And then there's brackets for whatever reason It's not a very pretty configuration file But that's not of that big of a deal, but it also means that it's kind of messy So there's a lot of quotation marks There's a lot of brackets when it really feels like you're wondering why there's both of those things if that makes sense right when you see a regular configuration file seeing both of those things together doesn't at least correlate for me personally So it looks a little weird and it is a little bit. I don't know. It's just a little bit confusing so the way it works is that it has the Modules at the bottom of the configuration file where it Basically has the settings for each module and then at the top of the configuration file You have this section right here Which is basically the part of the poly bar configuration where you're listing where the modules are supposed to be so you have left center right and That allows you to basically list the modules that you want to have in the bar and it works fairly well But again, there's quotation marks all over the place and it just bugs me I So if you watch the channel for any amount of time You know that I like making my configuration files like really really short So I like as few lines as possible in my configuration files And I don't really prefer Configuration files that require a ton of quotation marks a ton of brackets and stuff like that I don't really like that kind of thing now I could see if it was actually written in a programming language like in C or Haskell or Python or You know Lou or something like that all those things have rules when it comes to quotation marks brackets Parentheses things like that right you expect that stuff in a programming which this doesn't look like a programming language to me It just looks like a poly bar configuration mostly But with a whole bunch of syntax things that just don't really make sense to me So I haven't discovered why this is particularly the way that they that they do it But that's definitely something I'm going to look into because I'm very curious Is why they've made such a messy configuration file also haven't figured out where they do the colors yet I just got into messing around with Waybar today. So I haven't made that step yet I don't see any colors in this particular configuration files. I'm guessing that those are somewhere else Obviously so that those are my initial impressions of sway. It's basically I3 works fairly well but that's really the lower level of the Thing that I'm doing here because this is my first true experience of living and working in Wayland and I have had Thoughts about Wayland many times over the last two years I've tried to use it before and I've always come away with the thoughts that it's just not ready usually that's because screen capture and OBS was garbage and For the most part I was right screen capture in OBS was garbage up until about six months ago Apparently OBS got their crap together and it now works fairly well as you have seen or at least hopefully have seen It would be hilarious if I record this whole video and it didn't work That has happened to me before Recently on KDE Wayland. So hopefully what I just showed you all showed up in the video I'll have to check that when I'm you know editing So I want to talk a little bit about Wayland and my experiences so far with sway Which is a Wayland compositor Wayland window manager, whatever there are some things that have been pretty good So no screen tearing out of the box, which is nice. That's always something that I have to fix on xorg That's one good thing things like blur and anything you'd usually get with like pycom seem to Be something that you can use inside of Wayland without having to have something like pycom Which is nice haven't figured out how to configure that yet But the way bar at the top is transparent So the fact that that is something that you could do by default is kind of nice The biggest issue I have and the biggest issue that I've experienced over the last week or so Specifically when I initially first set it up is that there is an alternative to everything that you have to have Or most things I should say and it felt very much like I was switching from Windows to Linux When you switch from Windows to Linux, you have to look for alternatives to the software that you use on Windows You have to find a new graphics editor. You have to find a new audio interface. You have to find a new terminal Probably, you know, you have to go through and find Alternatives to everything that you use to use. It's kind of the same when you switch from xorg to Wayland You have to find alternatives to many things that you used to use So something as simple as like sxiv if you use that to view images in the terminal You can't use that anymore because that's an xorg application. So you have to use something like imv Something like Rofi does work So that was a surprise to me, but it doesn't work. Well, at least for me so far way Rofi has been giving me some issues Specifically the problem I've been having is that it appears on the wrong monitor Like it doesn't really seem to know what monitor that is in focus and it always appears on the other one Which is really weird another thing that you have to kind of learn how to redo is take screenshots something like flamestot doesn't work on Wayland or at least it didn't work for me and You have to choose something different to use in order to take screenshots. There's these little things, right? It's never anything like big like your terminal is going to work OBS works. I dash they works Firefox work All that stuff works just fine at least so far for me It's when you get into the little things the stuff that you know You'd use in order to do certain things like screen-shotting and setting a wallpaper and stuff like that Where you have to kind of find alternatives discover a different way of doing things and that's not a bad thing Like it's something that I'm willing to do but it felt like You're using something completely different in certain areas at least right It's just it made me feel like there were certain things that were just it was like I'm on a different operating system because I have to Find an alternative to all the stuff that I'm used to using that no longer works I think that that may be the biggest downfall of Wayland right now is that you kind of the there's no Intercompatibility now. I know the x-wayland exists x-wayland is a like a compatibility layer I'm sure that's not really what it's called But it's a good it's something like that where you can use xorg applications in Wayland, right? That's the goal behind x-wayland But I don't know if that's something you have to set up or if it's automatic or what I haven't really done a lot of research into it Yes, so I'm not sure how you're supposed to go out using that to get some xorg applications like safe flamish out to actually work and Maybe you don't have to do anything. Maybe it's supposed to work or maybe I'm just doing something wrong It's completely possible. I'm a complete newb when it comes to Wayland So I'm still learning but it feels like there's stumbling blocks there The real challenge is going to be steam because I know that that uses x-wayland So we're off to see how that works. I haven't even opened steam yet So I don't know how well it'll work or if it'll work at all. That'll be an interesting Challenge as we go forward. So my initial impressions of Sway and Wayland together is that it's better than I thought it would be honestly I wasn't worried about the window manager itself. It's basically just I3 You can do all the things that you would do an I3 inside of Sway. I wasn't worried about that I was scared to death of Wayland and it's been better than I thought it would be so overall I'm okay. The question I have to answer over this next month is why Like what exactly does Wayland offer me the Xorg doesn't and so far I haven't found that answer yet There has been nothing that has stood out to me inside of this Wayland experience that has said, you know This is you know better than Xorg so so far just have not seen that so We'll have to see so that is it for this video So if you have thoughts on Sway, you can leave those in the comment section below You can follow me on message on our honesty those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cash just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you The channel just should not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thanks so Very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. I'm speaking loudly and fast because it looks like we're gonna lose light So I want to get this done before we do that. Anyways, thanks for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time