i3 is a tiling window manager for X11, but it doesn’t work with the upcoming Wayland. Since i3way is pretty dead given the website, I was quite happy to see there are other efforts now in form of sway. I was worried that with the rise of Wayland i3 may become obsolete.
I tried this a few months ago and it was super buggy and slow. Using i3 with Compton mostly fixed the screen tearing on my 4k monitor
It’s still experimental, but it’s nice to see some work done for wayland.
Did some linux distro already changed to wayland by default?
Yes, Fedora 25 uses Wayland by default although it falls back to X11 for certain display chipsets (some NVidia chipsets for one).
I’m running gnome on arch linux with wayland which became the default this year.
I’m thinking on moving from gnome ti i3/sway. How did you do the step and why?
If you’re moving from GNOME to i3, you may be interested in reading about running gnome-session with i3 so you still have access to GNOME features like auto-mounting removable devices, media keys, screen-locking, etc.
Your reply touches something that I don’t really understand because I always used gnome. So for me it’s hard to tell where gnome ends and linux starts. Can you explain quickly why I want to run a gnom-session inside i3?
It’s not to run gnome-session inside i3, it’s to replace GNOME’s window manager with i3 in a GNOME session.
GNOME is much more than just a window manager, it’s a Desktop Environment. It provides a suite of softwares to manage your desktop. i3, along with most other dynamic/tiling window managers are just window managers.
Meaning: they will only provide you with a means of managing X windows. On their own, they will not provide a dock, menu/status bar, application launcher, notification system, etc. However, some (like i3) will actually have ready made solutions to replace some these components, and if one doesn’t come directly from the project, you just build up your suite of components yourself :)
It’s very much a more modular approach: GNOME is kinda like a flat-packed Desktop Environment, whereas if you go down the dynamic/tiling window manager route, it’ll be more like building your own thing with LEGO - which can be really fun, and beneficial in some ways.
I think Screwtape’s suggestion to try out i3 inside of a GNOME session is so that you could try i3 for what it is: a window manager - but still have the comfort of GNOME (the menu/status bar, notification system, application launcher, workspace manager).
I think he already did: to get the listed features that gnome implements.
That said, there are other implementations too.
i3 was pretty easy to get used to, but I had to spend an hour or so practicing after reading https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html
I used this for a while but ended up reverting back to i3/x11, as rofi (and many more apps) do not work as I would like. If I could get rofi working in a nice way I would be all up for trying again :-)