Posts about: Sway

Back from Hyprland to Sway

After a brief experiment with Hyprland, I’m back to using Sway. My experiment lasted less than a month, as I hoped Hyprland’s window selector would resolve my window-sharing woes.

It turns out it wasn’t, because the first week back at work I had the need to share a slideshow in full screen. Then it doesn’t matter if you can select a window anymore. So my workarounds with Sway would have worked in that use case while my Hyprland set up… didn’t.

Switching from Sway to Hyprland

Introduction

After four years with Sway, I’ve decided to transition to Hyprland. My journey from EXWM to Sway began about four years ago, and I documented the experience in this post three years ago. While Sway has served me well, it has its limitations that I’ve used hacks and workarounds to circumvent.

The Limitations of Sway

One major drawback of Sway is its screen sharing capabilities. Although I managed to get screen sharing somewhat functional, it only allows sharing the full screen.

NixOS: Setting up Push To Talk in Mumble on Sway

Switching to Wayland has it’s side-effects, one of which is the improved security from X11 where applications can’t just randomly spy on each other at any point.

This is both good news and bad news.

The good news:

• Applications can’t just randomly spy on each other.

The bad news:

• Things like global hot-keys in for example Mumble won’t work.

Back from complaining to actually solving the problem though.

Mumble does have a patch for a future release

So there’s the issue about Push to talk does not work in Wayland, this has been followed up by a patch Add DBus calls to de/-activate push to talk. This patch will land in the 1.4.0 release though while current stable is 1.3.4.

Detailed setup of screen sharing in Wayland (Sway)

Getting screen sharing to work on Wayland seems to be surprisingly hard. Maybe it is compared to X11 that doesn’t require any additional setup at all.

To have working screen sharing on Sway you really need three components installed and set up with correct environment variables.

These three components are:

• pipewire (I have version: 0.3.21)
• xdg-desktop-portal (I have version: 1.8.0)
• xdg-desktop-portal-wlr (I have version: 0.1.0)

These three components has to have systemd user services. You should be able to see them in the list if you run systemctl --user, just look for the different programs name ending in .service.

Switching to Wayland (Sway)

Like every other desktop Linux user for the past many years I’ve used X11. I was on i3wm for quite some time until I was introduced to Emacs X11 Window Manager which I used exclusively for about 18 months, I’ve even held a talk about it. But at some point it got too annoying, for example in multi monitor use cases.

At this point my first step was to go back to set up i3wm again. With that set up I wanted to give SwayWM another attempt, it was years ago I’ve checked it out before. I think my previous experience was when the project was new. At that point (if I remember correctly), not even the window decorations looked like the ones in i3wm.