Linux @lemmy.ml SnailMagnitude @mander.xyz 1 yr. ago

Minimal Wayland Software?

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.

41 comments

Sway and foot work pretty decently. Might want to check them out.
- imv as an image viewer
  
  emacs has wayland support
  
  zathura for pdf viewing
  
  Check Awesome Wayland for more.
  
  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.
  
  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?
- 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.
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
- Thanks, will give dwl a spin as I've been quite comfortable on dwm.
stacking wm -> wayfire

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

terminal emulator -> alacritty or foot
- 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.
  
  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 :)
  
  I thing they meant "floating".
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.
- How does hyperland configuration compare to sway? Or is it exactly the same?
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
  
  Cheers, will give it a look.
Sway with Alacritty, been my daily driver for the past year.
- I just wanted alacrity OSC133 support so much
- Thanks, I have i3 & kitty atm so not a huge leap.
I'm personally fond of Sway and Kitty
I use sway wm with the foot terminal emulator. If you do not like manual tiling I have heard good things about river wm.
Hyprland or sway, anything wlroots based really, and I use alacritty.
I use sway and foot, which comes with sway.
- 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
  
  I'm pretty certain that foot is the default terminal for swaywm.
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.
- Cheers, will give it a look
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.
- Cheers, looks interesting but don't think it can cover my daily drivers needs.
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.
- 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.
I am using kde with wayland. Works pretty well. Even with nvidia 3080.
- May give KDE another spin someday when I have a machine better suited but not for this potato.

You've viewed 41 comments.