It’ll probably make life easier to explain what is Wayland. This si not a full description, I’m not going into a advantages or disadvantages I’m simply telling you what it is.
What Is Wayland
Wayland is a communication protocol for a display server and its clients. It is not the display sever like x11 is. The display server is SWAY etc;. In Wayland, the compositor is the display server. You transfer the control of KMS and evdev to the compositor. The Wayland protocol lets the compositor send the input events directly to the clients and lets the client send the damage event directly to the compositor. In the X case, when the client receives the event it updates the UI in response. But, in the Wayland rendering happens in the client, and the client just sends a request to the compositor to indicate the region that was updated.
Technically each compositor is a different implementation of the Wayland Protocol, Mutter and K-win are two different implementations of the Wayland Protocol. While Sway is different one. The people who develop sway are also maintainers of the implementation it uses “wlroots” a modular basis for Sway and other Wayland compositors to build upon eg; wayfire or river.
What Is Sway
First thing I want to make clear is that SWAY is not a fork of i3. They are two different things. SWAY has been written from scratch, written from scratch to be a drop-in-replacement for the i3 WM supporting all of i3’s features plus a few. This was done (probably) to make it easier to people to migrate to wayland compositor. For help on migration the sway wiki has everything you’ll ever need.
If you’ve read carefully you’ve noticed I’ve referred to SWAY as a compositor - for all WM users a compositor you’ve probably heard of is picom. While SWAY supports all of i3’s features it does support the features of picom - that is the job of the compositor itself. So no blur or animations at least not in SWAY, a wayland compositor that does support all the fancy stuff is WAYFIRE - ( There’s a nice implemention of it over on garuda)
Our Sway
The edition that me and @morten-b be are developing is trying to make it easier for people to use a WM, like what @joekamprad did for i3. Just like any other WM or DE you can install i3 and SWAY alongside each other and pick which ever you want at LightDM login etc;. You can not use them (yet) on top of. So you cant have KDE-SWAY or XFCE-SWAY as you’d have KDE-i3.
But that’s ok! Just like you can use a WM alone you can use SWAY alone.
There’s been some confusion about what the actual script does:
cp -R .config/* ~/.config/
cp .profile ~/.profile
cp .gtkrc-2.0 ~/.gtkrc-2.0
chmod -R +x ~/.config/sway/scripts
chmod -R +x ~/.config/waybar/scripts
sudo pacman -Syu --needed --noconfirm - < packages-repository.txt
sudo cp lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf /etc/lightdm/
All it does is copy our config’s over to your home. As you can see it will overwrite you GTK2 and GTK3 themes as well as Alacritty if you use it on whatever your on now and LightDM. The easiest to way to make sure it doesn’t do anything is to use a new user - if your using a different DM simply run the commands separately and don’t run the lightdm thing.
sudo pacman -Syu --needed --noconfirm - < packages-repository.txt
This command here installs all the packages you’ll need. Like on the i3 page. i3 and SWAY and any wayland compositor will use relatively different apps. (Wofi not Rofi or Waybar instead of Polybar). Why is this good? Because it means they will not conflict, so although it not recommend you can run the commands too on the same user. You can run i3 and Sway and any other WM or DM alongside each other seamlessly (though one should use a different user).
cp .profile ~/.profile
This command exports some environment variables. Setting Firefox to use wayland (won’t affect usage I think on x11) setting a some other things as well. You can take a look as well.
The netinstall.yaml and setup.sh are for the installer you don’t need to worry about those.
This wasn’t meant to a wiki page (me and @morten-b have other plans for that 
) but @Pudge gave me the idea just to clear up a few thing’s that might confuse people.
This is not perfect - I’m open for suggestions!
