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?
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 ✌️
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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
