I'm still waiting for killer demo for switching from x.org/i3 to wayland/whatever next tiling. At least there are options now in Wayland other than sway, but hyprland currently is not motivating enough when demos mostly focus on eyecandy. Transitions especially are excess.

That being said I'm glad that Hyprland exists and shows people that there is power in minimalism. Fluxbox was my first love..

I used i3 previously (2013–2016), and after a few years back on Windows (2016–2021), decided to try Sway on my current laptop (mid-2021), which happens to have a 1.5× panel.

Not everything has always been smooth, but at some point when I was needing to do screen sharing via Zoom I had to switch back to i3, and the comparison was more stark than I remembered.

On i3:

Tearing (graphical glitches) is terrible, especially if you’re doing screen sharing. I can’t use my XF86AudioMicMute key because its keycode is 256 and X only supports 8-bit codes. The touchpad doesn’t work well. Scaling stuff is a total mess, a mess that you can mostly get to work, but you’ll need to set four different environment variables and run a gsettings daemon and set these three properties and add this file to this location and that one to that and modify your Chromium flags and I probably even forgot a couple of steps.

On Wayland:

Tearing is solved. I had to modify the keymap to get XF86AudioMicMute¹, which I suspect was because of X compatibility, but then it works. The touchpad works very well, gestures, scroll rates and all. Scaling is robust and automatic, if you have an integer scaling factor or are willing to settle for render-at-next-integer-and-downsample, which is a bad technique but good enough for Apple; and compositors now support proper fractional scaling, and apps are more commonly implementing it (though I’m distressed it took so long). Firefox Nightly has just this week finally fixed the last problem that I’ve noticed, and I hope they’ll default-enable Wayland fractional scaling and Wayland soon.

The only thing I feel Sway’s behind in now is its lack of per-window screen sharing. Other than that, it’s very solidly better than i3 in every way: in convenience (things work better out of the box), in robustness (features that exist don’t have issues) and in features.

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¹ Ran `xkbcomp $DISPLAY keymap.xkb`, then modified that file by changing `maximum = 255;` to `maximum = 256;`, and adding in appropriate places `<I256> = 256;` and `key <I256> { [ XF86AudioMicMute ] };`. Then, in ~/.config/sway/config, `input * xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` or similar.

Give Niri a few days of your time. It's exactly what you're looking for.

I have been having some issues with X/i3 (using i3 as a WM for Plasma), mostly with multiple screen setups (windows getting all screwy when connecting/disconnecting, lots of flickering, etc.), and also with my trackpoint's middle button scrolling randomly going away, and needing to use xinput incantations to fix it. I tried Hyprland with QuickShell, and after some QS-related pains, I just dropped to plain Hyprland. It's been working quite nicely so far. There was a lot of trial and error, and there's still some bits that could use improvement, but overall things just work nicely. The main sticking point for me now is that the screen-sharing and using Flameshot is a bit convoluted, and that the workspaces configuration does not support multiple external monitors (as in, the one in my office, and the one home, it needs some resetting each time I change those, or at least I haven't found the way to configure it properly as I had on i3).

So far, it has been a moderately positive change.

I moved from i3 to sway — an i3 clone built as a Wayland compositor — specifically to banish screen tearing from my experience.

Wayland’s architecture makes tearing inherently less likely not the least reason being that the compositor synchronizes all drawing with the display rate. X11 is much more of a free for all.

For me, it was getting a laptop with a high DPI screen, and the frustrations in getting X to play nicely with that.

There were annoyances when I realised I could no longer use certain workhorses (e.g. feh), but usually a bit of digging turned up a drop-in replacement (e.g. imv).

Check out https://github.com/outfoxxed/hy3. I use it for i3 capabilities on top of Hypr. It's AWESOME.

Mine, too. And conky. And how I loved those configurable shortcuts…

If you use i3, you can switch to Sway.

I mean, I got into Linux as a teenager in the first place because of cool compositor bling…