After trying Sway recently I read a bunch of github issues when debugging. I was disappointed to find many the comments toxic.
I’ll stick with i3 and probably look for something different in the future.
The examples that were easy to find again;
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1207#issuecomment-2984...
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/829#issuecomment-32683...
In Are We Wayland Yet?swaywm
sway
C2015–2026
swaywm / sway
sway
i3-compatible Wayland compositor
93Distinct people
106Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
17.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
i3-compatible Wayland compositor
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I really love the syntax and performance of fish shell, I had a few bash scripts that were used to manage the system volume notifications and power/battery information, as I…
L0stLink used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- ammen99/wf-recorder · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- emersion/grim · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- swaywm/wlroots · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year106 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-08-16 19:36:44 UTC to 2026-03-20 13:37:33 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 1 | 15 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 21 | 2 | 19 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 5 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
sway
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sway is an i3-compatible Wayland compositor. Read the FAQ. Join the
IRC channel (#sway on irc.libera.chat).
Release Signatures
Releases are signed with E88F5E48 and published on GitHub.
Installation
From Packages
Sway is available in many distributions. Try installing the "sway" package for
yours.
Compiling from Source
Check out this wiki page if you want to build the HEAD of
sway and wlroots for testing or development.
Install dependencies:
meson *
wlroots
wayland
wayland-protocols *
pcre2
json-c
pango
cairo
gdk-pixbuf2 (optional: additional image formats for system tray)
swaybg (optional: wallpaper)
scdoc (optional: man pages) *
git (optional: version info) *
* Compile-time dep
Run these commands:
meson setup build/
ninja -C build/
sudo ninja -C build/ install
Configuration
If you already use i3, then copy your i3 config to ~/.config/sway/config and
it'll work out of the box. Otherwise, copy the sample configuration file to
~/.config/sway/config. It is usually located at /etc/sway/config.
Run man 5 sway for information on the configuration.
Running
Run sway from a TTY or from a display manager.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
16 sourcesThis would be a good time to mention that sway doesn't support the nvidia proprietary driver [0]. The author recommends nouveau but this leaves out users that 1) have very modern GPUs 2) need vulkan 3) need CUDA 4) do heavy gaming. The author is also quite spiteful about it and I'm not sure I like that. There is even a flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" [1]. Whether or not this is nvidia's fault I can't judge but there are usually two stories to every disagreement and so far at least I haven't heard nvidia's.
For me at least, this is a dealbreaker as I don't always get to choose the systems I get to use and I'd like to use the same config/wm everywhere if I can help it and if I sometimes have to alternate between i3 and sway then that won't do for me.
[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia-users
[1] https://github.com/swaywm/sway
Read the rest
Unsure if you've seen it before, but I've been using sway [0] as a Wayland-based replacement for i3. Switching the configs took about 15 minutes (and could probably be replaced by a few sed commands). It's been very nice to use all around--snappy, no major issues even with multiple monitors, etc.
[0]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway
In Are We Wayland Yet?I really love the syntax and performance of fish shell, I had a few bash scripts that were used to manage the system volume notifications and power/battery information, as I use fish as my interactive shell, I ported them over to fish and tried to compare the performance, and to my surprise the fish variant was faster. I decided to rewrite the random wallpaper script for sway in fish too and it runs much faster then the original python snippet I got from swaywm's issues[0] (link to original python script[1]):
#!/usr/bin/env fish
swaymsg 'output "*" background ~/Pictures/Wallpaper/'(ls ~/Pictures/Wallpaper | shuf -n 1)' fill'
I really love fish shell and find its multi-line input extremely valuable, I think it has a much saner syntax (I have no meaningful experience writing bash scripts), if you are like me in this regard I highl
Read the rest
y recommend writing your personal scripts in fish instead and if you are worried about posix compliance, it is not that different from a bash script with bashisms in that regard.
[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1269#issuecomment-4316...
[1] https://git.sr.ht/%7Esircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/bin/wallp...
No problem. There's some issues with it right now, but feel free to give it some testing at https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/4570.
It has been an interesting exercise so far, and frankly a quite pleasant one. Rather than autotools or CMake, many of these projects are using Meson, which is just so much nicer. I also really have learned to appreciate Sway WM's code, which I personally think is quite nice now, after having worked with it (though, admittedly, the ease of segfaulting does make you long for something like Rust.)
In Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)swaywm supports screenshots and screen capture for sure [0]. I haven't personally done anything with screen capture on sway, but I can definitely confirm that grim works for screenshots.
[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#taking-screenshots
In The death watch for the X Window System has probably startedScreenshots and recordings work fine with Sway and GNOME. I don’t know about other compositors. See https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#taking-screenshots
In The death watch for the X Window System has probably started> Anybody else have thoughts/plans on the future of X if Wayland really does take over?
I have been thinking about this for a few years at least (happy i3wm user).
I am looking at moving to Sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway (drop in replacement) at some point as it seems the development is really healthy. sircmpwn (Drew DeVault) has done a lot of really nice contribution to the FOSS community, in particular wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots I also thoroughly enjoy reading his blog https://drewdevault.com (articles from there often get posted here) there has been many a time I've read something he's written and thought "hear hear" in my mind.
It is also impacting my purchasing choices in regard to going for AMDGPU instead of NVIDIA for my next system that I plan to buy in a few months (mostly waiting for 3rd party Navi cards at t
Read the rest
his point).
It'll be noticably snappier.
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Differences-from-i3
In Sway 1.0Sway is very close to a 1.0 release, 1.0-rc4 was just released:
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1735
It is and has been quite stable as a regular user on the sway-git version for awhile, but I can't comment on what it's like for Ubuntu or Debian.
In Linux Desktop SetupI believe that's been possible since 1.0-alpha.1 : https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1735
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