(Sad rant) Sway, why do you hurt me so?

Desktop Environments All WMs
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I’ve had it. Like the gently falling snow, bugs and glitches built up over time until I just couldn’t take it any more. I tried Timeshift. I tried re-installing the lot. I tried backing up dotfiles. I kept having to re-walk the same paths, fixing things where they weren’t working, and many times giving up as the troubleshooting chasm got wider, and wider, and…

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE tiling window managers. I LOVE keeping my hands on the keys, whipping around with the slightest movement of a finger or two. I LOVE windows appearing where I want them, how I want them, without any fuss or meddling with session layout files.

I should have been able to fix things. I’m reasonably competent and can usually figure out what is breaking and have a ballpark idea why it’s breaking. But as my path took me deeper into the brambly thicket that lies between Qt and GTK, I have admitted defeat. I no longer want to spend all my time troubleshooting. I headed off to find something that brought less pain to daily use.

Sway resonates with me best as it’s just a WM. While I’ve tried Hyprland (and didn’t inhale), I don’t need any of its visual dramatics. I might try it again, but as it’s in the weird zone between Sway and a fully-built-out DE, there’s no compelling use case for me right now.

My quest sent me wandering about other WM distros, and many of them were even worse. One’s live environment would not let me connect to the internet – it wouldn’t launch the network manager from the GUI or a terminal. One distro decided it was up to the user to find the keymaps, which was problematic since highly customized ones were used to launch a terminal. One was so opinionated that there was no way I would spend time reeling it in back to something usable for me. And one that boasted about its ‘support’ for a plenitude of WM/DEs, then dumped me at a skeletal Sway install – which anyone could do themselves by running “pacman -S sway”.

Out of curiosity I’ve installed the default CachyOS KDE Plasma desktop, mostly to see how the Qt/GTK wars were handled. Far fewer issues were popping up, no “Cannot find org.blah.blah.ginger layout” messages. The regular stuff I installed behaved. Well, most stuff behaved with one notable exception, but that’s neither here nor there. I blame Proton-Wine for that. :slight_smile:

But… it’s KDE. It may be the best out of all the other DEs, but having to use a mouse for darn near everything again is… painful. Literally. My rotator cuffs are not pleased with the reach-around (pun deliberate) I’m doing. Windows that refuse to stay where they’re put. So many fiddly options in the never-ending equivalent of a control panel. Yes, the speedy optimizations feel faster. I was happy with the standard kernel’s speed though.

Web surfing. Video watching. Moderate resource-consuming games via Steam (no FPS, multiplayer, etc. for me!). Pretty standard fare; no complex workflows or dev environments required. KDE is overkill by a country mile. I’ll return to EOS and Sway the next time the system needs a reinstall; I just have to take a break from it for a short while as I can’t face troubleshooting as part of my daily routine.

Thank you for reading my sad rant (bemoan?) and letting me air my grievances. I’m not leaving, I’m just not currently Sway-ing. :smiley:

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Sway has not been difficult for me, it has a stable API (unlike HyperLand). So not really sure why you had so many difficulties…well unless you have an Nvidia GPU maybe?

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Have you considered trying the EOS Sway Community Edition? This is where I started with Wayland tiling WMs.

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Well I know this rant is about Sway, so this is just a bit of a side note concerning KDE.
There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts available on KDE to prevent you from having the mouse moving around and you can even make your own shortcuts. Just take a look at system settings > keyboard>shortcut settings . Furthermore there is the accessibility option to move around the mouse cursor with your numpad (not ideal maybe, but it is possible). In the App menu you can even make shotcuts for the apps you use.

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On top if this can set window rules to have them open in the same place on the screen at a predefined size.

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I think that is a fair sentiment. It can really be a pain getting a reasonable theme to stick, especially with GTK since it tends to be a moving target.

But there are GUI apps that make it really easy to manage, for example nwg-look for GTK apps:

Kvantum is popular for Qt apps:

Not much to look at on the Kvantum GitHub page now that I look at it…but both nwg-look and Kvantum are available in the Arch repos and can be installed with Pacman, and the GUI interface is simple enough you can figure out how to use it just by poking around.

This article has some useful tips for wading through the troubled waters of GTK/Qt theming as well:

I think the fact that this article even exists suggests there are a lot of us who struggle with this insanity.

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Just back from a long vacation. I’ll give EOS Sway another go because I’m stubborn that way, maybe even set up a VM first. Thanks for all the suggestions, folks!