
Sway 1.0 - ddevault
https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/11/Sway-1.0-released.html
======
peteforde
Congrats on the release! You should be very proud of what your movement has
accomplished.

I want to highlight something that I appreciate in your release post, which is
the short explanation between paragraphs 1 & 2:

"Sway is an i3-compatible Wayland desktop for Linux and FreeBSD"

One of my major peeves with OSS projects is the tendency to adopt an "if
you're reading this, you already know what this is for" stance. It's not just
elitist... it's a missed opportunity to bring passers-by into the fold.

It might seem dull or repetitive to people that are deep in the trees to see
layman explanations, but at least linking to them is a small but appreciated
nod of respect to people who are just coming online.

To this end, I would challenge that you could set an amazing example that goes
further towards accomplishing these goals by linking the words in that
description to readable explanations of what the words mean in the context of
this project. Your goal should be to move beyond what Sway is and perhaps
start with why Sway exists. It's clear that this is important, but someone
coming in has no idea what motivated you and your army of contributors to stop
other important projects and build this. Where does it fit into the concepts
that they are already familiar with? What other technologies does it replace?
What can I do with this that I couldn't do before? Are there tradeoffs to
using this over other solutions? Are there situations where I shouldn't use
this? And eventually: are there newer projects that Sway inspires which are
even better that I should probably be using instead?

If we look at your explanation in this new light, "Sway is an i3-compatible
Wayland desktop for Linux and FreeBSD", you can see that it's opaque to people
who aren't already familiar. i3... you mean like the Intel i3? What's Wayland?
I use Ubuntu... isn't that my desktop? I heard MacOS is based on FreeBSD, so
can I use this on a Mac?

These aren't problems, they are opportunities to be a hero to the silent
majority of people who have no freaking clue what a tiling window manager is
or why it might be applicable to them.

~~~
markstos
Thanks for saying this! I noticed this too. Sway got this right.

So often I'm linked to a project status announcement where I soon give up
because it's not all clear what the project is about. Even just adding a
sentence or two like Sway did goes a long way.

~~~
sephoric
I fell into this same trap with Autumn
([https://sephware.com/autumn](https://sephware.com/autumn)) because it's such
an abstract concept that it's hard to explain all that it can do. First of all
the term "window manager" is overloaded and many people thought it was just
like i3 or dwm but for Mac, but it was actually a lot like Slate or
Hammerspoon. But also, just like Hammerspoon, it's incredibly versatile and
allows you to do a whole lot more than "manage windows". I tried to use
visuals to fix this problem, namely a video and a lot of screenshots, but I
don't think it helped. The fact is that I'm terrible at marketing (despite
decades of trying to get better), and I just have to admit that. Well that and
the fact that apparently nobody ever wanted or needed a "window manager with
an IDE built in" product, and so I also suck at being a PM apparently.

------
ilovecaching
This is huge news. Sway is absolutely incredible, it puts macOS, built by
Apple's army of engineers and dump trucks of money to shame in its simplicity,
stability, and efficiency. If you want the best of the best DE, look no
further. If you're on the fence about trying a tiling windows manager, I say,
give it a shot for a single week and you'll never look back. Invest a few
hours in a sway config file that will serve you for years.

Also, migrating from i3 is super easy and painless. Really a seamless upgrade
experience. If you've been holding off upgrading to Wayland, now is the time,
Sway is absolutely ready.

By the way, you should donate. These people absolutely deserve your money.

~~~
kstenerud
I really don't get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and
instantly felt boxed in. There's not enough room on the screen for everything
I need to have opened and flip between, which is why I use an overlapping
window manager in the first place.

~~~
DCKing
With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload.
Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize,
or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some
way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space
that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive
load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can
pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people
whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel
tasks. I understand why so many developers use them.

With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is
much less. You open a program, get a window with focus somewhere. You can
start doing your thing immediately without considering window management.
Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using.
Subsequently organizing the layout of your windows to be optimized for your
current workload however takes more time. This appears to me to make stacking
window managers to be more suited for people whose computer use is more
dynamic or less organized - people can open and close stuff on a whim.

More organized vs. less cognitive load can be both a personal preference or a
workload dependant thing. In case of tiling WMs it also doesn't help that they
tend to have very low discoverability and depend almost exclusively on
keyboard shortcuts versus GUI elements, only adding to their newbie-
unfriendliness. I think that's also telling about the use cases tiling WMs are
popular for.

I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective
superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and
disadvantages to both.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
What I've been thinking is, why can't we have both? Imagine just two changes:
a workspace's mode can be switched between tiling and floating, and additional
workspaces are just windows. Now you can have any combination of floating and
tiling that makes sense to you. You could, for instance, set your desktop to
tiling mode and open two new workspace windows, the switch one to floating and
run your GUI desktop stuff on the left side of the screen and several terminal
tiles on the right.

~~~
irth
I think AwesomeWM allows that

~~~
leshow
I used awesome for a few years and while I think you're correct to say it does
try to do both, in reality it ends up doing neither very well, IMO.

------
williamdclt
I like the idea of tiling window managers but never got the use for it.

99% of my time is spent between my browser, my IDE and my terminal. A half-
size browser is painful to work with, I need it full screen. Same for IDE.
Same for terminal, I do need multiple terminals but I want them together.

I also have another workspace for chat stuff (browser with whatsapp, slack,
messenger) and another for random apps (spotify mostly)

So I end up having cmd-tab set up to switch between browser and IDE (don't
even get me started on the default macOS behaviour) and have a drop-down
terminal mapped to shift-space, so I'm always one keystroke away from the app
I want to use. For the rare case I use another app (some excel file containing
data), I can afford the manual window switch.

And for the tiling terminal, tmux is my friend. Also allows me to see the same
set of terminals between workspaces (multiple terminal windows on the same
tmux session)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Personally for the most part I only have one application per workspace, and
switch workspaces frequently. I often have several terminals on one workspace,
though. I don't regularly use any GUI applications other than qutebrowser (web
browser) and alacritty (terminal emulator).

~~~
n42
how do you do password management? I setup Sway/qutebrowser last week and love
it, but the lack of password management extensions was crippling. I reverted
to Firefox + Vimium, which has been a subpar experience to qutebrowser.

from what I understand the team on qutebrowser is actively working on an API
for addons, but in the meantime it's a nonstarter for me.

thank you for your contributions, by the way.

~~~
pimeys
I keep a keepassxc open in the scratchpad, available with one keystroke on any
desktop when I need it.

Workflow:

\- site needs a login

\- mod+- to get keepassxc to the front

\- ctrl+f for search, typing the first letters of the service

\- ctrl+c to copy the password

------
DC-3
I have nothing to say, so by rights I shouldn't leave a comment at all - but I
can't help but once again thank you for this superb software.

~~~
jamesbvaughan
That's a great thing to say :)

And I'd like to second it: Sway has been great and I'm stoked for this
release!

------
Memosyne
What's the status of blurry XWayland applications on HiDPI screens? I tried to
replace i3 with sway a couple months ago and couldn't get VSCode to look
decent with scaling.

~~~
mikenew
Current status: still sucks, unfortunately. From what I've seen the developers
have more-or-less decided that it would be a lot of effort to get scaling and
input to work correctly for X applications with HiDPI, and they'd rather work
on new things, not supporting old things. Which I certainly understand, but it
kills the experience for most applications that I tend to use. So I can't
really switch until that changes or more applications support wayland
natively.

~~~
e12e
Is this only a problem with x11 apps? If so, I'm a little surprised there's
not a Wayland based build for Electron that'd make it easy to fix the issue
for vscode?

Hm, looks like the branch/subproject in chrome is "ozone" and some work is
ongoing there:

[https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9056](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9056)

[https://github.com/Igalia/chromium/tree/ozone-wayland-
dev](https://github.com/Igalia/chromium/tree/ozone-wayland-dev)

------
npmaile
I've been using sway nearly exclusively for about a year and love it. Nearly
everything I do with it just works. Additionally, I keep seeing Drew all over
the net with various projects, blogposts, and other useful contributions.
sr.ht is an interesting project I would recommend people take a look at.

------
rudilee
Sway is the reason why i got the bravery to fully embrace tiling wm even
though i switch to i3wm at the end due to some bugs in 0.x version. With i3wm
they both make tiling wm so much more accessible to linux noob like myself,
the ability to combine tiling, tabbed and stacked windows feels so much
powerful for productivity boost. Congrats for the 1.0 release, given news
about so much improvement over 0.x version, I might looking to switch back :)

------
jadbox
Is there an update to the nvidia (proprietary drivers) situation with
sway/wayland?

~~~
mises
The author still flat-out refuses to support them. This might change if Nvidia
open-sources their drivers, which I suspect is part of what he's trying to do.

~~~
cwyers
Probably, but given the relative levels of adoption of Nvidia graphics cards
and Sway, I suspect that he's doing more to limit adoption of Sway than he is
of encouraging Nvidia to change their behavior.

~~~
badosu
I would say it's the case in both accounts.

Whereas before installing nvidia proprietary drivers was just a nuisance, now
I am looking for alternative GPUs as I use Linux on all my machines.

~~~
Qub3d
I'm just using i3. Its a little "realpolitik", but I use an eGPU and AMD's
lackluster, power-hungry options just don't compete, especially when I'm
losing 10-15% performance to TB3 overhead.

I'd love for this situation to change, but until then, i'm on i3-gaps and
happy.

------
willtim
Congratulations on the release! I currently use i3 but am looking forward to
trying this. Backwards compatibility was a great idea!

------
raehik
Awesome! Fantastic news. If there's any chance sircmpwn is lurking here, quick
question: has there been any further development on IME support? I use
Mozc+IBus. Last time I tried on sway it almost worked, but the prediction box
didn't show.

That was the only gripe I had with sway. It solved all my tiny issues with i3
and made config much nicer too. Certainly making the switch if IME is better
(or if I can easily help out).

Real big thanks to the wlroots/sway community.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
はい、Swayでibus+anthyはできます。Mozcはできないと思いました、でも今から変わったが可能性です。Swayを楽しんで！

~~~
girzel
How about fcitx?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Not sure.

~~~
girzel
I should have just tried it first -- seems to work great. 谢谢!

------
tarruda
For a long time Xorg/i3 user, are there visible improvements when switching to
Wayland/sway?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
It'll be noticably snappier.

[https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Differences-
from-i3](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Differences-from-i3)

~~~
mario0b1
Does "everything else" work with wayland? Like is the compositor the only
thing I need to get most applications running without too much hassle?

Disclaimer: I haven't read up anything on wayland and don't know too much
about how X or it's mechanics work

~~~
lapinot
sway comes with xwayland configured, which makes it zero-effort to run X-only
software (eg software that doesn't use a wayland-enabled gui library like
gtk3, qt5, sdl2...). The only pain will be if you have a hidpi screen, since
xwayland will scale a non-hipdi rendered X window instead of passing down the
scaling factor to X (which apparently is tricky). I'm in that case and what
caused me the most hassle was firefox, but there is an experimental wayland
branch (for which fedora provides prebuilt binaries) which i'm running
smoothly.

~~~
deevus
Still don't see Sway 1.0 in Fedora repo though :(

------
laumars
How well does Sway work with multiple screens? And hot plugging / unplugging
those screens?

I have a laptop hooked up to 2 additional monitors. When going to meetings I'm
often disconnecting the screens then reconnecting them when I'm back at my
desk.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
It should work great. If your laptop has a limited number of CRTCs you may
want to use this to deal with enabling/disabling the outputs you want to use
as necessary:

[https://github.com/emersion/kanshi](https://github.com/emersion/kanshi)

~~~
laumars
Thank you. I do have multiple different configurations (3 screens at home too
but arranged differently) so that will come in handy

------
jniedrauer
I've been using sway since the 0.15 days. I switched to the 1.0 branch about 6
months ago, and watching the rate of improvement has been amazing. I haven't
used an xorg system in over a year now. I'm very excited about this release.

~~~
sevensor
Totally agreed. I was blown away by the improvement in quality brought by the
1.0 beta, and I'm looking forward to using the release!

------
josteink
That’s _great_ news. Congratulations to everyone in this important release!

Now for a completely orthogonal but still slightly related question: which
Linux-browser does currently have the best Wayland-support?

Any clear favorite or are they all pretty much the same?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Firefox.

~~~
josteink
Thanks! Any particular flags needed or should I be good OOB if running the
nightly channel?

~~~
colemickens
It switched a while back, it's MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND now (or will be soon?), as
far as I understand:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780)

Note that perf for Firefox+HiDPI+Wayland-native is noticeably worse than
XWayland (regardless of whether it's scaled or Firefox is rendering itself at
2x), and keyboard shortcuts are still not functioning correctly (and
apparently only in Sway).

------
markstos
I remember when Linux desktop environment release announcements came with
screenshots.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Sway desktops are usually customized to suit the preferences of their users.
You probably won't see the same one twice. Try this:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/search?q=sway&restrict_sr=...](https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/search?q=sway&restrict_sr=on)

~~~
markstos
Thanks for the response. I tried a previous version of Sway and am interested
to try it again now that it has reached 1.0. I understand the nature of it,
but I still think _at one_ screenshot would be helpful for people to get the
general idea. I would use one that includes a number of bells-and-whistles
enabled, as it's easier to visualize something removed then to guess what
might be added.

------
slashink
Really exciting to see this released!

Is there a good distro to run this on? I run Ubuntu at home but from my
understanding, adding Sway to Ubuntu seems non-trivial. Is there a good distro
I can switch to that supports Sway?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Sway runs fine on most distros, so it's going to come down to other things.
Debian experimental has a package for it.

~~~
slashink
But Debian ships default with X still right? So what distros are wayland
native with Sway in the repos?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Debian has Wayland support. Like I said, most distros work fine with Sway. It
would be harder to find one that doesn't.

------
Insanity
Kudos on the 1.0 release! I'll install it on my machine tonight to give it a
spin, so far I've mostly been using xfce but been wanting to try out a tiling
WM for some time :)

------
symlinkk
Congrats on the release, Drew. I'm going to fire up a Linux distro this week
and try this out. Out of curiosity, what distro do you use?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Thanks! I use Alpine Linux.

~~~
elagost
You've probably written about it before, but care to elaborate? Is alpine as a
desktop in any way viable for regular users?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I don't know what "regular users" means. I write new Alpine packages often,
you shouldn't expect everything to already be there - especially with respect
to GUIs. If you're not prepared to do that (and you should be, imo), Alpine
may not be for you. I love it, though, it's simple and efficient, and doesn't
get in my way.

~~~
elagost
"Regular users" for me means someone who doesn't want to fuss too much with a
desktop system; I use Fedora (or Debian until recently) because I want to
spend my time administering my servers, not my desktop system that is the
interface to those servers. "It Just Works"

If it comes highly recommended, though, I'll give it a shot. OpenRC really is
a thing of beauty and that's the one thing I miss from Gentoo.

------
jcadam
Hmm... tempted to try a tiling window manager again (tried i3 a few years ago,
but couldn't really see the utility at the time), since I just got a big 32"
4K monitor for my dev machine. I've caught myself starting to manually arrange
all my windows into "tiles" anyway, now that I've finally got the screen real
estate to do it :)

~~~
sevensor
I also run a big monitor (39" 4k TV), and tiling is great. I can fit 3-6
terminal windows / text editor windows side-by-side, depending on the fonts
used. Sometimes I put windows with larger fonts at the periphery, and a couple
of small-font windows in the middle, so that I can easily look to the side for
reference while focusing on a column of smaller text in the middle. This works
beautifully with Kakoune, where I have multiple windows attached to the same
editor session. I can paste from my large-font reference windows into my
small-font working windows without having to figure out where my mouse pointer
is.

------
abrowne
Does anyone use Sway (or a tiling wm) mostly with graphical applications? Sway
is tempting since it supports some niche features other Wayland compositors
may never support, like cursor hiding à la unclutter and real redshift. I use
a terminal everyday, but I don't mostly use a terminal.

~~~
pard68
I use vim so I use a terminal nearly all the time. But I also do non terminal
things and none of my personal computers have anything other than i3. If I
only needed tiling in a terminal I would just use tmux

------
sydney6
There must have been so many "unforeseen" blockers from the basic design idea
up to this 1.0 release. And indeed, it appears that the sway developers have
walked the walk. Pareto's Principle at it's best.

Anyhow.. Congratulations to this truly impressive achievement.

------
0xb100db1ade
I really want to use this but I've had trouble with Wayland and HiDPI.

Has anyone gotten proper scaling working?

~~~
colemickens
Wayland is the only place that HiDPI really works correctly, so I'm surprised
to hear this.

Scaling just works... except with XWayland apps. And I think we should
investigate sommelier more for that, though it's increasingly irrelevant to
me, as a user. Note that Chromium seems to be a big burden right now, as
Ozone/Wayland is not ready yet and is not included in default configurations.
(But I'm going to start publishing Chromium+vaapi+wayland builds to nixpkgs-
wayland, which I maintain).

Let me know if I can answer questions or help. Sway is the first place I've
finally get decent about Linux+HiDPI.

edit: To emphasize my point, I can actually step up/down the scaling factor in
.1 increments (imagine Ctrl +/\- keybindings). It's not quite as smooth as
ChromeOS's entire UI scale, but I honestly never thought I'd see this in
Linux.

------
sergiotapia
The video is great and useful, shows me what it's all about in 2 minutes. Good
stuff.

------
Tharkun
This might finally get me to migrate away from awesome-wm, which I've been
using for basically as long as it's existed. As far as I can tell, awesome-wm
has been dead for a while, with only one release over the last two years or
so.

~~~
icebraining
They didn't have any releases in 2018, but the January release had plenty of
stuff:
[https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/releases/tag/v4.3](https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/releases/tag/v4.3)

And quite a bit of activity in the last 30 days:
[https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/pulse/monthly](https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/pulse/monthly)

------
AdmiralAsshat
Are we able to change window position yet? One of the thing keeping me on X is
the simple drop-down terminal, which I'm told is impossible on Wayland because
Wayland does not allow its applications to control the window position.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I gave a short talk at XDC which shows how sway & wlroots solves this problem:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuRXHJu5Kmg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuRXHJu5Kmg)

tl;dw: you can't set your position but a drop-down terminal is still in the
cards

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Hello, Drew!

Thanks for responding.

Having watched the video, it seems like we could do a "pop-in" terminal (which
is how guake and tilix already do their "drop-down" mode because they let the
WM actually do the drawing), but a true "drop-down" terminal a la Yakuake or
the old id Quake consoles would require some additional functionality, since
you'd essentially have to re-draw the application window at Y Pos +10 each
time to give the effect of a moving window until it reached its final point.

Is that possible?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
You can just animate the margin of the layer surface, which controls its
distance from the edge. It can be negative.

------
filereaper
Longtime user of i3, looking forward to sway becoming fully adopted.

I won't be switching to sway anytime soon as I _really_ need support for
screen-capture and video-sharing (i.e Zoom and Google Hangouts) to share my
code screen for walkthroughs with my remote colleagues.

I effectively downgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to the more stable 16.04 due to the
lack of above support.

I see the following in the release notes:

>A real time screen capture protocol has been developed and implemented (which
allows for future third-party screenshot and video capture tools)

Waiting with baited breath till support for it is fully fleshed out.

Cheers.

------
sevensor
I just noticed that this has already hit the Arch community repo, for my
fellow Arch users.

------
7e
Are global hotkeys supported?

~~~
emersion
Yes, you setup global hotkeys in your Sway config file.

------
stackzero
Nice work. Stuck on mac at the moment but am excited to try this when I can

------
sandov
Any plans to move the source code from github to sourcehut?

------
jh
:cries from windows:

In all seriousness, I have not found an i3 clone for windows that I am happy
with. I am making due with a combination of VirtuaWin for workspace switching,
windows key app positioning and multiple monitors.

------
rat9988
From the faq:

"Tip: buy your hardware with open source support in mind."

Is it really necessary to put statements with such a condescending tone? Am I
the only one who thinks that it can only hurt a project in the long term?

------
simlevesque
Thank you Sir ! Is there an update guide somewhere ?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Wait for it to land in your distro and then just run updates normally. Feel
free to file an out-of-date notice for the package if appropriate. Have fun!

------
paulcarroty
Congratulations! Laugh every-time when haters says 'Wayland was failed' or
'Nobody use Wayland'.

------
Spearchucker
Worked hard at Microsoft and at Nokia. Held senior positions at both and maybe
loved what I was doing too much to burn out.

That said I then took on some enterprise roles and the lax work ethic blew my
mind. It was like a vacation. Eternal summer. I recommend it.

~~~
majewsky
Wrong thread?

~~~
Spearchucker
Yes. No idea how I managed that.

