 Distributions that come pre-installed with window managers are actually fairly rare. The vast majority of distros that are out there all come with desktop environments. And those few that do come with window managers tend to focus on providing a lot of choice. So if you're going to go with something say like ARCO Linux, you're gonna have a lot of choice of what window manager you have. Same thing with like Endeavor OS or Manjaro even. Like you're gonna have a lot of choice over what window manager is available. Even on something more conservative like Fedora, you have options of a couple different window managers. If you look at the Ubuntu sphere of things, however, there really aren't that many distributions out there that offer a straight up window manager experience. So you don't have a ton of choice there. So when I found that there was a Sway window manager remix of Ubuntu, I was kind of excited, but also I tried to temper my expectations because it is Ubuntu and me and Ubuntu don't always get along. So I've been checking out Ubuntu Sway remix for a little bit now and I have to say, I'm very impressed. I'm like, I'm very impressed. I think that they should make this a flavor. That's how impressed I am. So today we're gonna be taking a look at Ubuntu Sway remix and it's really, really good. Before we jump in, if you could leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channels. So let's take a look at Sway remix and we'll start by talking about the installation. Now, this does not use the Ubiquiti installer. It uses Calamari's and the setup is very, very Calamari's. If you've ever used a Calamari's installer, you will know exactly what this one looks like. I'm gonna show a little bit of B-roll here and it's a Calamari's installer. There's nothing special about it. The only thing I will say is that it does not give you an option for alternative file systems like a lot of Calamari's installers do. So they haven't built that in yet. Hopefully that's something that they consider doing in the future because I'd like to see butterfs be more prominent in pretty much everything. So that's just me. But other than that, it's a Calamari's installer. There's not really much to say. But once you've got it installed, you have a system that looks a little bit like this. Now, I am not someone who has spent a lot of time in Sway Winner Manager. I personally am not interested in using Wayland all that much to be just completely frank with you. I've talked about it on my channel many times. Wayland and I don't seem to get along. Mostly because of the content creation set of things where I have to have problems recording stuff. Also, I've never been that impressed with the bar situation on Wayland. So when I see this bar setup pre-configured for me, I'm pretty happy because first of all, it means I don't have to do the work, but also that is a sexy bar, guys. That is a very nicely put together bar. And the fact that it's there out of the box is really, really, I mean, it's just really cool. It's very well done. And they've just done a fantastic job of just making it look nice. And the thing is that I'm used to configuring polybar on Xorg, right? And an Xorg-based Winner Managers. And getting rounded corners in a module is impossible to do. Well, it's not impossible to do, but it requires a ton of like really weird adding extra modules in order to get half circles in there and stuff like that. It's not an easy thing to do and it's very tedious. I don't know if this was as tedious as it looks, but I can't even imagine trying to do that on polybar. It would take quite a while in order to do. So I'm really impressed with the bar. So that's just very first impression. The bar looks awesome. So if we go to the actual desktop, one of the things that you have to do, if you're going to ship a Winner Manager distro, right, if you're gonna create a distro for Qtile, if you're gonna create a distro for Xmonad or whatever, it doesn't really matter. The one thing that you absolutely have to do is have something on the desktop that shows the default key bindings and they have that. So they've checked that off the list and it's good. And they've done a very good job of prioritizing the things that are important. So the ones that are the most important are at the top. So how do you kill a window? Super shift Q. How do you reload sway? Super shift C. That was hard to say. How do you exit sway? Super shift E. Those are the ones that are most important. They're right at the top. So good job there. It's surprising how many Winner Manager distro maintainers don't think to do this, right? A lot of them just assume that you're gonna go spunking into the configuration, follow the very first thing. And while that's probably true, that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be some helpful hints there for someone who stumbles upon this distro and doesn't know what they're doing. The fact that this is here, very good. So a few things you should know about the distro. It is based on Ubuntu. This is version 23.04. So it's the most recent version of Ubuntu. There are no snaps here, which is something that is really good. Also probably will prevent them from being a flavor eventually. So there goes my dream with that. But still it's fine. No snaps, which is personally, like it's good for me, but not good for their ambitions to be a flavor if they had those ambitions. So their stated mission for this project is an attempt to provide a user-friendly desktop based on sway. A popular tiling window manager using the modern Weyland graphics stack. Ubuntu Sway remix is a great for both beginners who want to get familiar with the keyboard-oriented interface of the tiling window managers and advanced GNU Linux users who want a powerful user-friendly minimalistic interface. Ubuntu Sway contains popular console-based applications and utilities along with graphical user interface applications to meet the needs of most users. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the pre-installed applications here in a minute. But I will have to say is that a lot of times I judge these distros based on their website. And if I were to continue to do that, I'd say that this is one of the top tier ones. It's very, very nice. It's also simple enough where I don't have to go splunking for the download. It's literally right there at the beginning. So, SuperShiftQ to quit this. Now let's talk a little bit about the pre-installed applications. Now, SuperD gets us to what I'm assuming is a variation on Rofi. It's probably something like Tofi or Wofi or something like that. I'm not actually sure. Again, I'm not a Weyland expert. One launcher kind of looks like the same to me. The one thing that I found myself mightily impressed with is the display settings thing. Now I don't know actually what this thing is, right? I've never seen it before in my life. It says it's called NWG displays. It is a revelation, okay? I did not know this thing existed, but it's like Arander, but better. Okay, so Arander is an application that you would use in a Winner Manager on XOR to manage your displays. This is kind of like that, but for Weyland. Now normally on Weyland, when you'd want to try to change the display resolution, you have to do so through the terminal and it's very compositor specific. The fact that this exists and is installed is just two thumbs up from me. It's very, very good. And it was the first thing that I wanted to do. So I was actually kind of wondering how I was going to change the resolution because I'm in a virtual machine right now. And normally on Sway, you have to use the Sway terminal application in order to change the monitor display resolution. And I honestly couldn't remember what that was. I was going to have to look it up, but I got into the menu and saw that the display settings was right there at the top. And I was like, well, okay, that's pretty damn good. Okay, so past that, let's go ahead and actually quit that. So you have Firefox as your web browser. You have Audacious for a music player, the Azote wallpaper manager. So we can actually open that up and see if there's some wallpapers here. So that's all the wallpapers they display, even if that's not the wallpaper that is included. So I'm assuming there's probably another folder somewhere that has the wallpapers. So they have PCMan FM as the file manager. They have a document scanner. These are all basic Ubuntu applications that sometimes comes installed. Foot is the terminal. So this is foot right here. And they're running bash 5.2, even though it does look like they have fish installed. So they have fish installed. Yeah, so you could use fish if you wanted to. They have G-parted here, GTK settings. This looks like a fork of the XFCE settings, but for Wayland. So that's really interesting. So you could change your Wayland settings or your GTK settings through here. They have Cavantim installed. So you could change your QT applications. LibreOffice is installed. Mate Calculator, MPV for music, MusicCube which is another music player. So they have two different music players. NeoVim's installed by default, which is nice. Also Vim was installed, either that it was alias two and Vim. I'm not sure about that. Q-browsers here. Pluma, printers, pulse audio. Rangers installed Rofi. So this is Rofi. They have transmission and they do actually have Vim here as well. So Vim and NeoVim are both installed as the thorough for PDFs. And that's basically it. So let's take a look at the welcome app. So this is pops up whenever you restart or when you install it, I should say. And I have to say that it's not the best welcome application ever. Simply because it does keep the link for run Calumaris once you have installed that probably should go away because you can't install it a second time. That'd be really weird. But other than that, it's just a very basic welcome application. I'm not actually sure what you get when you press next. Oh, you can change. It does have links for changing the GTK scheme. You can change the color scheme. It doesn't appear to come with other color schemes. I looked at their theme directory. It looked like it only had the one which is a little bit of a shame because I would love for them to have different themes but that's maybe something for them to work on in the past. You can change the shell from here, install software. So it does come with, you know, I'm not actually sure what that is. What is this? It's called packages. The fuck is that? It's called packages. I have no clue what that is. I've never heard of it before in my life. I'll be 100% honest with you. I've used GNOME for, you know, off and on for years. I've never been a fan of it but I've been in and out of GNOME and GTK land for a very long time. I've never heard of the application packages before. I've heard of GNOME, the GNOME store. I've heard, you know, I've seen Synaptic Package Manager. I've never heard of this before. That is, apparently it's been around for a very long time. Copyright 2007 to 2009. So it's been a package kit. I've never heard of that before either. Apparently I'm just an idiot or completely out of the loop. But anyways, this is what you use to manage packages. So you could install packages from here. It reminds me a lot of PAMAC on Manjaro to be honest with you. That's kind of cool. I had no clue that this was a thing. I learned something new today. Honestly, Ubuntu probably should just use this. So that right there is your software store which is, again, very reminiscent of PAMAC. So there's that check for updates and that just opens up the Ubuntu update checker. I believe that's what that is. So this is version 23.04. As I said, it's running kernel version 6.2 which is very up to date for an Ubuntu. It is not reporting the resolution correctly but that's going to be a new fetch problem. Not anything to do with Sway itself. It's using about a gigabyte of memory even though I think I have, I don't have a browser open. So that's actually not too bad. We'll see what it looks like when we use free dash M about 1200 at the moment. So that's not too bad. So as I said, it's using 6.2. That's a generic Ubuntu kernel. So I guess all that's left is to talk about the configuration file. And honestly, the configuration file is where I'm a little bit disappointed. So the look and feel is good. The included applications I think is spectacular. They've done a really good job of putting this thing together but it all comes down to the configuration file. And while I'm still very impressed with this, the configuration file is a bit of a let down. So the one thing about Sway that you should know is that it's supposed to be one to one compatible with i3's configuration file. And the idea here is that you're able to take all of your i3 stuff and all of your i3 knowledge and know how and put it towards your Sway configuration file. If you choose to do so, it doesn't mean that you have to. There are Sway way of doing things I should say. You can do things in a different way but the idea is that you can go from one to another and be very, very comfortable. Now maybe that's not their audience for this but for me personally, I'm much more familiar with i3 than I ever had been with Sway. Now if you take a look at their configuration file for this particular version of Sway Winner Manager, it's not as user friendly as I would have hoped. Now I've spent some time trying to find all of the things that you're supposed to be able to change and stuff like that. So if you were to just look at this right here and you didn't know anything else, you just knew the bare minimum. You know there's a configuration file, you knew how to find the configuration file but you didn't know anything else. Where would you say the key bindings are, right? If you wanted to make a change to the key binding, let's just say you wanted to change from super shift Q to super Q which is something that I want to do. Where would I find it? And the answer to that question is I still don't know. So this one here is going to be for the theme. So that's going to be just colors. This one here is, seems to be where most of the key bindings and stuff are but it's also done with secondary variables that are defined somewhere else. I don't know where they're defined yet. I still haven't found them. So there are some key binding set here. So you see bind sims some places but it's not all the key bindings and some of them are, so the key bindings are set as variables that are defined where still not sure. So this seems to be the file where most of the key bindings are at but again, it's not done in such a way that it's easy to just, I want to go change the key binding for PCMAN FM or I want to go change the key binding for opening Firefox. Where are those actually set? And the answer to that question remains a mystery. So these are the user variables. If you go here, that's just an empty file with some read me. So you actually have to create that file yourself. Those, if you were to create variables inside of that directory, that would override the global variables. If we go to the outputs here, that's just going to define the default screen. If we go to the inputs here, so that's going to define the default keyboard and default gestures and stuff. If we go to modes, I'm just gonna take a fly in the dark, this defines some modes. So this is the default mode. Oh, hold on a second. See, I didn't even think to look inside the modes for the key bindings. There we go right there. Those are the key bindings. All right, so we can actually change this to the thing that I wanted to change this to. Okay, so there we go. So as you can see, you have to explore all of those files in order to actually find the things that you're looking for. And I had skipped over the modes previously and didn't even think to look for there for the key bindings, which now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense because this is the default mode. That's where you'd find all the key bindings for this particular mode. And then you have another mode in another mode and key bindings for those modes would be defined there. So I've always been a big fan of switching out and sourcing files inside of a configuration file because it makes things neater. But the way they've done this thing here is just so super complicated. And even now that I've found this, I can't actually edit it, right? So I went from one file to another without pseudo privileges. And if you noticed when I did that, I was just in my regular home directory. And then if I go here back to modes, you see where this is stored? It's stored in Etsy Sway modes, which means in order to actually edit that file, I have to have pseudo privileges. Okay, now I know what they want you to do is actually to go up here to the user variables and probably set things there. So that means that if you wanted to set a key binding or a variable, you'd set it in that file, which would override the global ones and that's what they want you to do. But that is just so super unnecessarily complicated. This is not a proper way of doing a configuration file for anybody, whether you've been using it for a long time or you're brand new. And especially if you're trying to draw in people who are new to window managers, this is definitely not a proper way of doing it. Okay, I shouldn't say it's not a good way of doing it. It's proper, you can do it, but it doesn't feel good. And it doesn't make intuitive sense for a lot of people, especially storing a lot of stuff outside of the user directory where you have to worry about things getting overwritten when it comes to updates and stuff like that. All the stuff should be in the user directory where it could be easily edited if people wanted to edit it. Now, there's gonna be the alternative side to that maybe they don't want people to mess with the default configuration files in case they don't know what they're doing. So you're protecting the people from their own ignorance or whatever. That's possible, I suppose, but as someone who's used window managers for a long time, I don't care for the configuration file of this all that much. And not necessarily the way the configuration file itself, just the way they've set it up. It does feel very unintuitive to me and I don't really care for it all that much. So that is the Sway remix of Ubuntu. I'm very actually kind of impressed the configuration file stuff aside. Everything else just is very, very nice. And I really do like it quite a lot. They've done a good job of theming it. They've done a good job of choosing packages that make sense. And it's just overall a very good experience. And I'm probably going to keep it installed as one of my window managers or as one of my virtual machines. And just, I'm just gonna use it for a little while because I'm very, I haven't spent a lot of time in Sway and I probably should. Maybe that configuration method is the way Sway does it by default. No, I don't know. It's not the way they used to do it. It used to be just a .config slash Sway and then a config file on there. And as far as I know, that's the way they still do it, but maybe they've changed. So that is the Sway remix. If you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. If you haven't already, leave a thumbs up on this video. It really does help the channel. You can follow me on Massa down on Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuscast. Links for PayPal and YouTube will be in the video description as well if you'd rather support me there. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Again, just thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.