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.

all 42 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 19 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago (2 children)
    • imv as an image viewer
    • emacs has wayland support
    • zathura for pdf viewing

    Check Awesome Wayland for more.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 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?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    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

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 3 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.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 3 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    stacking wm -> wayfire

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

    terminal emulator -> alacritty or foot

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 3 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    I'm personally fond of Sway and Kitty

  • source
  • [–] 6 points 3 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.

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    Hyprland or sway, anything wlroots based really, and I use alacritty.

  • source
  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I use sway and foot, which comes with sway.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

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

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments