#swaywm

[hannahmontanalinux-official]

Alpine Linux + sway is a criminally underrated combo for low-end hardware

[pipewire-official]

the thing i love the most about sway is how goddamn snappy it is. like yeah i pressed the button the window is there now. especially with terminals

[andmaybegayer]

I was using Plasma at work for a while because of some broken Zoom X11 stuff but I'm back on Sway now and man. The fact that it is almost impossible to lose track of a window on Sway alone is worth it. Speed of movement is a big plus, as is predictability, but to me the main issue with free-floating windows is that sometimes a window will simply be entirely behind another window and there's no quick way to get to it.

I mean. I guess this is what Plasma Present Windows and Mac OS Missions Control are for. Messy though!

[lizzyfleckenstein]

what do we think about this setup girls 👉👈

[gcc-official]

Soon...

[scaththefloof]

my sway config because yes

[hemthead]

NixOS Rice Journey

I've always considered myself something of a minimalist when it comes to function over form and beauty within simplicity, but there comes a time in every Linux user's life when they must rice.

Now, firstly, I want to acknowledge that @kfithen's recent ricing journey is like, 50% of the reason I went through with this (\shrug/ he had a good idea, what can I say?!). To be fair, the other 50% is the control and understanding that a good rice gives a person over their computer and environment. I want to know how everything works, and I want to be the person who makes it all come together really well.

I'm not really the type for flashy things or eye-catching rices / eye-candy (I've been using only I3wm for almost the entirety of my Linux history), so I want my rice to take a more subtle, simple approach. I use NixOS because I want my system to stay with me forever and only do what it needs to. I want to spend years optimizing everything I use until my OS reaches its minimal state. In the same way, I want my rice to display the elegant simplicity of nothing extra. I want some basic utilities and visuals that look nice, but aren't distracting.

Most of all, I want my rice to embody my own spirit, or at least what I strive to be. I want to put work into making something that does everything it needs to without encroaching on others. Ideally, I will be able to look at this every day for the rest of my life and it will help me feel secure in myself.

All that said, here's what I've done so far:

Migrated from X11 to Wayland

Switched to greetd and tuigreet for my displaymanager

Switched from I3wm to Sway

Setup Waybar to tell me what I need to know

Setup a custom desktop wallpaper (as opposed to the default Xfce wallpaper or Sway grey)

Setup vifm to view and manage my filesystem

Setup ivm, foot, mpv, etc. to replace xfce-given programs

Upgraded from NixOS 23.11 to 24.05

[Image ID: A (16:9) screenshot of my desktop. There are no windows open. The wallpaper prominently features a modified Nix logo in the center, taking up a little over a third of the vertical space. The logo has been modified so that each of the six "arms" corresponds to a stripe in the trans-nonbinary-flag; the top-right corresponds to the blue stripe at the top of the flag and the arms continue down the flag in a clockwise motion (i.e. blue, pink, yellow, white, purple, black). The background of the wallpaper is a dark grey that is light enough for the black arm to be visible. At the bottom of the screenshot is a Waybar status bar. On the left it shows (left to right) the sway workspaces, workspace name, and scratchpad; on the right it shows (left to right) the system volume (with wireplumber), the keyboard layout, the free space on the root partition, the memory and sway information of the system, the local ip address and wifi-connection strength of the system, the core usage of the system, and the current time and date of the system. The bar is styled with the default styles (for now). \End ID]

[Image ID: Another desktop screenshot. This one shows three windows open with the Sway window manager/compositor. One window, containing my home-manager configuration open in neovim (using the slate colorscheme), is the result of a horizontal split and lies on the left half of the screen. The right half of the screen is vertically split into two windows. The top displays an unstyled vifm, and the bottom displays the output of neofetch. The inner gaps of the windows are set to 10 in sway and there are no other gap configurations. \End ID]

So far, I've been focusing mostly on getting my system working again (leaving xfce completely left a big mark on my system, previously I was using Thunar and a billion other things I took for granted). I'm going through another terminal-based-stuff craze so I'm trying to do more and more stuff through cli and tui applications (flameshot -> shotman, xfce-img-viewer -> imv, xfce-video-player -> mpv, thunar -> vifm).

The only thing I've done cosmetically so far is the background. I wanted to get something that wouldn't clutter my screen if I ever implement transparency, so I didn't want to do anything too complicated. (I'll admit, my first thoughts were Homestuck, Lackadaisy, trains, etc., but those were way to complicated (save for some of the Homestuck stuff, that was good, I just didn't super vibe with anything)). I'm really happy with how it turned out though (the Nix logo is great for customization)! I think the trans-nonbinary-flag colors look great here and fit the vibe sickly. Also, it's Pride Month, so how could I not have something queer on my screen all the time?!?!?! (Well, besides Linux, and NixOS especially, that's queer already, lol).

This post is getting a bit long, so I'll quit my yappin' and end it off with a little summary of what I hope to do next:

Get some sort of transparency (what's the use in having that beautiful wallpaper if you can't see it, plus the background has a low enough complexity that transparency will actually work well)

Set some standards for theming/colors and put them in place (right now my Waybar and vifm especially just don't look right) (this one is going to require a lot of work, but there are also a lot of people who do this amazingly; plus, I've got some colors to work with already :), I really like the the "slate" vim theme and those trans-nonbinary colors are a great start as well, particularly that purple!)

MOAR TERMINAL (maybe try again with steam-tui, risk discord-tui, and re-examine links/lynx) (plus this really helps with fileviewer in vifm)

Try out nix-flakes (I really need to figure out what these things are, they sound right up my alley!)

Setup backups of my system / get all my configs into nix (the few that aren't already there) (I have some suspicion that nix-flakes might help with this)

Learn more (there's always more to learn!)

Welp, that's about it for now! See ya :3

[mirqmarq428]

i was thinking about switching to wayland when they give support to legacy nVidia devices (Phobos, Deimos, Mars, some other ones i haven't acquired/rescued/resurrected yet but will in the unforeseeable future). How's your experience with it so far?

No experience with Nvidia whatsoever. Haven't touched their hardware in my life.

Wayland in general is pretty good. There's basically 3 of it:

1. Gnome. Relatively isolated and monolithic, but quite stable for that. If it works, it works great. With the downsides being your well known gnome caveats: high resource draw, bad customization, opinionated workflow. I'd compare it with using a Mac.

2. KDE. Buggy like KDE plus what Wayland was 5 years ago. Stay away. That applies to kde in general too. But especially kde with Wayland.

3. Wlroots (everything else). Technically hyprland, sway, river, etc are all separate implementations of the Wayland spec - but they all use the wlroots library as a base and the config files are a similar format. Things you would xset in your .xinitrc are all doable via the config file, and it also does shell commands for things like tray daemons. Unless you insist on compiling your own WM every startup (think DWM/Xmonad), these are great. Sway has the largest ecosystem and is probably the most stable, hyprland is flasher. I don't have significant experience with the others but they seem chill.

iirc there's nouveau builds of sway and hyprland in the AUR - those might be worth trying.

Thanks for the ask!