6 months with Wayland + Sway #

I've spent the last 6 months working only in Sway which is a wlroots-based tiling WM.

Here's a list of things that work so far:

• Browsers. Both Firefox and Chrome have native support for Wayland. I didn't notice any significant bugs so far.

• Video conferences: Zoom and others.

• Screen sharing.

• Fractional scaling. I have a 32" hi-DPI screen, so integer scaling wasn't enough to be comfortable

• Stability. Sway hasn't crashed a single time on my machine

• Video decoding acceleration in Firefox. YouTube on Firefox was a known CPU hog under Xorg. It's no longer the

  case with Wayland.

  What doesn't work

• Clipboard is lost when you close the window that the text is copied from. This is something I had to work around

  by writing a script that re-populates the clipboard with the latest copied text.

• Rewriting keyboard input. If you want to use Cmd-C to copy text instead of Ctrl-C, you're out of luck. It was

  possible on Xorg with a tool, but not on Wayland, because of the increased security of Wayland that prevents you from having "keyloggers".

• Laptop screen sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep, unless I switch to a physical console with Ctrl-Alt-F1 and then

  back. I think this is a problem of swaylock or sway itself, because it doesn't happen in Gnome wayland session for me.

  So far, I'd say that if you want to roll with wayland, your best option is Gnome, where things just work. I'm adventurous enough to go with Sway and fix or work around things that break.