For those that used both, what’s your opinion on both?
Which one look better, easier to use OOTB, and straight forward to set up?
I have had i3 installed on an older laptop which I use just for simple things. Not gaming and such gpu demanding tasks or compiling stuff. Now there is the sway edition of Manjaro installed.
The default of Manjaro sway is pretty nice. I see everything what I need and don’t have to adjust or tinker anything. I think it is a pretty good out-of-the-box experience. However, I didn’t try to change the default settings at this moment, although I would switch from the foot terminal to alacritty terminal.
In my opinion, sway look better and is a good replacement for i3 if you want to switch to wayland.
I used both and now have sway as my main wm. Both work well, but when you as I go from one display (laptop) to two displays and back you get to enjoy the automation coming from wayland. It’s a pain in the ass to always have to use arandr to get it right in i3wm because of the limitations of xorg.
While I am biased and clearly in favor of the sway edition: for automating scaling/display tasks on i3/X in general, you could give autorandr a try.
i3 is stable, you don’t have to adjust to new features.
Sway is being developed. The Sway edition especially often wants you to manually update the config files with those in /etc/skel
I prefer sway, I feel like avant guarde when using it.
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ah, that is a misunderstanding: that note is being displayed after every update - better safe than sorry. I try to keep the numbers of times that is really necessary to a minimum.
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Ah, cool to get to know my OS maintainer!
Well, I did it maybe twice.
Sway edition runs on a very weak laptop with 2GB RAM.
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I gave sway a try on a new laptop, while I had i3 installed on my workhorse (desktop). TBH I didn’t enjoy the experience of sway. Although I am sure it is very lightweight as well, and it comes with nice features ootb, in my case it was slow af.
I believe i3 is better documented also, and surely returns more results when you use a search engine as compared to sway. It was fun to have results returned on MS’ sway when I searched for sway (without the wm part), although it wasn’t less fun when I had first searched for i3 and had received results on Intel’s processors. That said I find i3wm more comfortable to type than swaywm. (I’m weird, I know).
I liked sway’s status bar features ootb more than i3’s which is nearly non existent, but I like i3’s colors better, because they are more discreet, and don’t distract me all that much.
Yesterday I decided I didn’t like sway more than I liked i3, and I installed i3 on the same laptop. With very little configuration (and I really mean very little), it just outperformed sway in my case. It feels so much more lightweight, and so far I haven’t had any of the issues I had had with sway, on the same machine. Plus copying over the configuration and editing out a couple of lines that had to do with the external monitors, I had the very same functionality as I have with the desktop computer.
Lastly, since the monitor of the laptop is fullHD but 12.5", everything in sway was tiny ootb, and very difficult to read. I had experimented with the various options that were available, and lately I had stuck with the scale option, but the result wasn’t uniform. Some applications were ok, others were still too small. With i3 and arandr I just had to set the screen resolution to a smaller one once, and everything has been scaled up.
So for the time being I think I am sticking with i3.
I used the manjaro-i3 edition for 4.5 years. I changed a lot on the configuration and used polybar etc etc. The defaults, back in 2018, where not that great.
Now I’ve been using manjaro-sway edition for about 8 months and I prefer this a lot. The defaults are a lot better than what I got with the i3 edition back in 2018 (maybe the defaults of the i3 edition have improved, I don’t know).
The bar and everything that came out of the box was a lot more tailored to my needs than what came out of the box with the i3 edition.
Just my observation.
I felt VERY comfortable with manjaro-sway, after installing it. I added a few things from my old config but I did not feel the need to “recreate everything” or “carry over everything”.