I’m interested in TWMs for some while now.
Currently, I’m running Gnome with the Forge extension, which gives me a quite nice tiling with the full fledged DE experience I need.

Especially Hyprland is the project I have an eye on the most. The ultra-smooth animations are just out of this world! (I’m not only locked on Hyprland tho.)

My current setup feels a bit clunky, and I want something proper, without losing the comfort of a fully functioning DE.
My end goal maybe would be making my own uBlue-image with a setup that works sane out of the box.

Are there any setups and recommendations of needed packages?

How do Sway, Hyprland and other TWMs differ from each other?
Which one would you recommend for starters, and which one is “the best”?

What do I need to know before getting started? Should I just dive into it head first?

If I have to ask all these questions, would you just say I should ditch the idea for now, with my current level of knowledge and time?

What has your experience been? Any problems I may encounter?

Thank you for your answers?

  • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    9 months ago

    Sway is a great manual tiler and I’ve had no issues with it for years. Sadly it doesn’t have animations, since the devs don’t want to add features not in i3. Imo this limits its potential, because even i3 supports animations through external compositors like picom.

    river has imo the best (dynamic) tiling, but it has seperate workspaces for each monitor, instead of a single set moveable between monitors.

    Hyprland supports manual and dynamic tiling, and almost any other configuration I can imagine. My hyprland keybindings are basically a copy of rivers default. Having hundreds of options available makes it a bit difficult to find the correct ones at first, but once it’s done it’s done (and hopefully version controlled/backed up with git).

    • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
      0·
      9 months ago

      Is there a fork of Sway, that is more future oriented and wants to break that original idea of just replacing i3?
      I’ve heard something of SwayFX. Is it something like that?

      I think I will just try many different ones with someone else’s customisation in a VM and see what I like.

      • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        9 months ago

        I’ve never tried SwayFX, as animations aren’t really important for me (altough I currently use them (sped up) on hyprland).

        Edit: Remember that almost all apps/bars/launcher available in those preconfigurations also work on other compositors. I personally recommend to make note which tools you like and assemble them to a desktop you like on any compositors. E.g. my desktop looks and works nearly identical on Sway and Hyprland.

  • VerbTheNoun95@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    9 months ago

    Sway and hyprland are going to be the main recommendations, especially hyprland because it is pretty feature-rich. I personally have been using River for the last few months, which I’ve been able to completely replicate my five year old bspwm set up with using the rivercarro layout. It’s not as popular, but I’ve really liked it so far.

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
    0·
    9 months ago

    Hyprland provided you’re not on Nvidia

    I use it on Nvidia on both of my machines and it’s not exactly what I’d call stable, recently updated my system and both of my machines broke in some way

    Laptop can’t launch VScode now, desktop gets jitters when running certain games

    That said the latter was an Nvidia driver regression that I believe has a fix in the works now