this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Will be doing a fresh install on an old laptop in the near future and was considering trying wayland.

Can you recommend a decent & light window manager & terminal emulator?

I've played around with wayland but always ended up back on xorg, was gonna give it another shot.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Sway and foot work pretty decently. Might want to check them out.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • imv as an image viewer
  • emacs has wayland support
  • zathura for pdf viewing

Check Awesome Wayland for more.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In case you're already using emacs I wouldn't bother with a separate pdf viewer - pdf-tools for emacs is imo the best PDF viewer nowadays available on linux.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Well, I gotta leave something for those who choose to reside with the beast: Neovim

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

imv looks good, thanks for the link

I'm a bit confused, I left Reddit to escape emacs users....should I be on kbin instead?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

imv is the absolute best

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

There is no saving your soul; Emacs is life, Emacs is death. /j

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

In case you want eye candy (or how I call it: the Wayland compositor doing compositing) you can also check out swayfx. Personally, I use it with kitty and waybar.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I use hyprland and kitty on my modern desktop and my 12 year old i3 laptop.

If you want to have a really minimal Wayland compositor take a look at dwl

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks, will give dwl a spin as I've been quite comfortable on dwm.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

stacking wm -> wayfire

tiling wm -> sway [corrected, i don't know what was going through my mind]

terminal emulator -> alacritty or foot

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Sway is a tiling wm and wayfire looks like a floating wm to me. I don’t know what a „stacking“ wm is, but afaik you can stack in sway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

thanks for the correction, i don't what i was thinking while writing that. i guess i couldn't decide floating or stacking for wayfire so the whole thing broke down :)

[–] mrvictory1 0 points 2 years ago

I thing they meant "floating".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Most of my machines are KDE on X, but I have one where I've been feeling stuff out in Wayland-land. The most appealing thing I've tried has been Hyprland with Waybar. It's a little bit of a kit in traditional WM fashion, but easy to configure from straightforward config files, fairly light, and not "Just like this X WM, but broken because of missing Wayland functionality" (I know, I know, it's not technically Wayland deficiencies, its "not yet complete extensions", because it's all extensions, the Wayland protocol itself does almost nothing).

I've been using Kitty for a terminal emulator and it's pleasing as well.

I haven't found a launcher I love, I have fuzzel right now and the only major issue is it doesn't currently support mouse interaction, and I prefer a "use whichever input device your hand is on at the time" to keyboard-only.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

How does hyperland configuration compare to sway? Or is it exactly the same?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

They're both simple text formats, but Hyprland uses a "key = value" type config with section labels. Sway is largely compatible with i3 config files which are more like an unstructured script.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I like sways configuration file more because the naming on hyprland isn't stellar. But hyprland has a config for anything I'd ever need which is awesome.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Have personally been using KDE Wayland on EndeavourOS for a while, and It's been free of major bugs save for some games going to a black screen after tabbing out of them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Vivarium

Please don't blame the lack of popularity, Vivarium works and its feature complete. The dev answers to the recent github issues.

i3-like WMs are underfeatured and Hyprland is less minimal than Vivarium.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks, looks cool.

I find i3 & dwm a bit much out of the box and need to remove titles, borders & hide the status bar. Hyprland had a lot going on, will check out Vivarium.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Sway with Alacritty, been my daily driver for the past year.

[–] lrabbt 1 points 2 years ago

I just wanted alacrity OSC133 support so much

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks, I have i3 & kitty atm so not a huge leap.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

I'm personally fond of Sway and Kitty

[–] cow 5 points 2 years ago

I use sway wm with the foot terminal emulator. If you do not like manual tiling I have heard good things about river wm.

[–] biblbrox 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I am using kde with wayland. Works pretty well. Even with nvidia 3080.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

May give KDE another spin someday when I have a machine better suited but not for this potato.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I like puppy linux as a distro for old laptop refurb, starts lean and mean, allowing older laptops to recapture some of their former glory.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Void is my plan. I went with Fedora last time as I couldn't be bothered setting up Void properly and Fedora was the only distro with a generic kernel that seemed old mac trackapd/keyboard friendly at time. I've not tried Puppy for a long time, I tend to opt for AntiX or Porteus in that kinda area.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I use sway and foot, which comes with sway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

foot does not come with sway. why do you think foot comes with sway? foot and sway are unrelated.
they're both good wayland software, though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm pretty certain that foot is the default terminal for swaywm.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

interesting.
the default config file is basically "Drew's preferences watered down a bit for a general audience"
alacritty used to be Drew's preferred terminal for sway.
sway does not come packaged with any terminal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Manjaro sway comes with foot. Maybe he/she meant that…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

fedora sway too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Try RedoxOS: https://www.redox-os.org/faq/

If you're into developing or willing to learn Rust, it can even offer you a paid summerjob. RedoxOS runs even on Pentium III.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Cheers, looks interesting but don't think it can cover my daily drivers needs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Labwc is really a decent window manager that can pretty much be used on its own without a panel (I think). I think foot is pretty fast, but I just use gnome console, because I'm a savage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Cheers, will give it a look