Distro is more an alignment of philosophy between you and the distro. Something slowly updated but really stable? Debian. Something cutting edge, but with lots of guides? Arch, etc. etc.

Any of them can pretty much run any shell, DE or WM, and as that’s what you spend the most of the time interacting with, that’s a more personal touch point. The distro is really just the package manager that you regularly interact with, and thats easy enough to hide behind something like topgrade.

I have only used Sway for a few years and anything else feels bloated and slow to use to me now. I spent a long time tweaking to get it how I wanted both in terms of add ons and config, then setting the keyboard shortcuts that work for me. I even have a bunch of them configured on my actual keyboard on layers to make them even easier to activate.

Its worth the investment for me as its now transparent to my workflow. I run the same config across all my machines and its been a stable config for the longest time. Long term stability is the key for me.

Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.

First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.

Another starship user. Mostly want it to summarise useful stuff for folders pulled from git or whatever so it’s pretty plain rest of the time. I use the same on all my boxes

Borg daily to the local drive then copied across to a USB drive, then weekly to cloud storage. Script is triggered by daily runs of topgrade before I do any updates

Ive said repeatedly that its certain to be an issue with their setup I have even provided proof that its not typical.

Its just a terminal applies to pretty much every type of application. There are lightweight WM, text editors, terminals, etc. etc. for a reason.

I can run my current setup with its 2 different animated 4k wallpapers and all the over shit I have running on my old 4800u that is only slightly slower and it consumes an insane amount of CPU at idle. Just because you can does not mean you should.

Its six years old, that’s starting to get on a bit now for a processor that was never anywhere near top of the line from AMD when it was new.

I think if you are trying to bling our your desktop and not expecting it to impact performance from an older, less powerful setup then generally speaking you are going to have a bad time. You should be pitching your desktop experience based on what your hardware can handle, there are plenty of terminal options available depending on what you need, just like there are plenty of WM/DMs if you have a lower spec machine.

Having said that, it was pretty damn obvious that there something wrong with ghostty on their setup, and its misleading to say that ghostly is just bad because of that.

Its a bit slower than Alacritty for my use case, not massively enough, but enough to put me off. The extra functionality such as its TMUX stuff I just do not need. I think if you want a more fully featured terminal, particularly if you do a lot of code writing in the terminal, then I would pick Kitty.

I only really do quick remote editing in the console so its not important for me, and I do not want TMUX as I use a tiling WM. Terminal launch speed is particularly important to me because of this.

I haven’t tried foot yet, that is meant to be good for wayland and as I use Sway it might be better fit. I would need to get frustrated with Ghostty before I could be bothered to switch, which is what happened to me with Alacritty over image support, shallow as that sounds.

ryzen 5 3600

Yeah thats what I would call old now, lol.

There is 100% something wrong with your Ghostty.

Heres a shitty gif I made to show you how fast Ghostty, Alacritty and Konsole is on my PC, all way less than a second and I am running a ton of background crap including different 4k animated wallpapers. Gif

Something wrong there, Ghostty is just as quick for me. Are you using an older PC?

Both load for me in milliseconds, even with fastfetch stuck in my startup.

I recently switched from alacritty to ghostty as I wanted image support as ghostty implements the kitty protocol for it. Ghostty seems as fast as alacrity to me, but with better support. It even has a tmux type replacement, although I haven’t used it as I don’t need it with sway doing that for me.

If you are the person asking the floating window question from the other day as JustAnotherKay spotted, then this is how I set a window to floating in my config;

for_window [title="www.youtube.com" app_id="firefox"] floating enable, resize set 1280 720 , opacity 1

What this is doing is selecting any firefox app that has www.youtube.com anywhere in the title and make that floating, with a set size, and remove any opacity (transparency) that might be applied to the window.

You can add move absolute position 0 0 on the end if you want to set the absolute location for the window.

You can force a window to a particular workspace by:

assign [class="discord"] workspace number $ws2

and that workspace to a particular monitor with:

workspace $ws2 output DP-1

If I wanted to do this for all firefox windows I would just remove the title= part from the selection.

How do you get the titles and other components? Using swaymsg as follows:

swaymsg -t get_tree

this will output all your open windows per monitor, for each app you want to manage you are looking for something like:

#15: con "#tech-talk🖥 | 40% Keyboards - Discord" (xdg_shell, pid: 6260, app_id: "discord")

from here you its simple to pick up what you can use for a unique select, so app_id:=“discord” in this case.

If you reload your config file, then reopen the app, it should reflect the changes you made to the config file. Logging on and off in the worst case will restart it.

Sway let’s you float and overlap windows. Also for both tiled and floating windows you can set the size, position, workspace and monitor by the app id (e.g., firefox) or part of the title (e.g., lemmy).

Yeah roll your own everything even greeter is the way forward if you want to customise.

I used to use gnome and I am heavily into customization. I gave up using gnome as they would constantly change things often for no real reason that whimsy, breaking previously working scripts, extensions and so on so I stopped using it. Its fine if you want to customize the basics like wall paper but I really wouldn’t bother for in-depth customization. Not because it isn’t possible, but because maintenance of it is a PITA.

Yeah I added bluetooth in mine, it’ll show me whats connected on hover and just launch the gnome app for bluetooth if I click it, super lazy implementation. I don’t need brightness controls so never looked at them.

EOS seems to use mako for notifications? I have never tried it.

I use swaync, which once themed and the rights bits you want, added, is ok. I wanted something more like the Gnome notification drop down that had do not disturb, media player controls, extensible menus, etc. in it.

The EOS files look a great place to start.

Do you default your apps to start on a particular workspace?

Never used hyprland but Sway you can use the mouse to move stuff around, resize windows, etc. just hold down you mod key, usually super/windows key. If you have a bar setup correctly you can even click between workspaces or have a task list like on windows that you can click on. Alt Tab needs some re-imagining as its now three dimensional, but that’s easy to tweak to how you want it with something like swayr. You can even add a start button equivalent if you wish.

I use Sway on Tumbleweed, before that Sway on Ubuntu. I have six main workspaces defined, odd numbered workspaces on my left monitor and evens on my right monitor. Both monitors are 32"@4k so a ton of real estate, I can easy fit in four large tiles per monitor, eight is a stretch but if you use the option to make windows full screen then you can run stuff in the background and then flip between things that are running in the background.

I use the layman add on to predefined layouts for my different workspaces, then bind apps on start up using my config to a particular workspace. I can still move them around, but automating as much as possible with a tiling windows manager is the secret IMO. Having everything just work and appear where I want with zero faffing around speeds up my workflow enormously. On Windows I use power-toys to provide a noddy version of tiling, but everything has to be done manually and its a complete PITA over a work day where I am opening and closing stuff.

As an example, I have my third workspace as my main coding workspace. Its divided into 3/4 and 1/4. The larger part I lock VS Code to it, the smaller part is usually a Firefox tab for reviewing documentation. My second workspace is my social workspace, that’s divided into four long quarters, one for music, one for discord, one for signal, one for mail. All of this, including binding the apps to the workspace, are fully automatic.

I use the keyboard for most things. I use QMK based keyboards (configured using Vial), so I can bind multi modifier shortcuts to just two keys either on a separate layer (activating the layer is one of the two keys) or a chord. Reducing the number of keys you press really helps the ergonomics of activating them, especially if you move them to the home row and away from the pinky finger hell hole that is where the modifiers are on most standard keyboards.

I think the biggest problem is that it requires work to get the right add ons and make it work the way you want to work, but get it right and the WM becomes transparent to how you work.

As this is for work you want reliability and as Microsoft have a habit of changing stuff so stuff breaks I would suggest the web apps or if you need advanced features from the apps, a Windows VM. The latter is what I do, admittedly I manage and develop for m365 so my needs are greater than someone just using Office.

The web apps are pretty good, not a 100% feature match but good enough for most people, some things are actually better now in the web app. I would only write them off if you have really shitty unreliable internet or really need something not yet supported in the web app.

Otherwise go with a VM, but it will push up the specs of your device as you will need a decent amount of RAM and cores that you can dedicate to the VM if you want responsive behavior from Office clients particularly with large files. I assign 16Gb RAM and 4 cores (I have a 8945HS) and its pretty snappy. I can run it in 8Gb but its a bit shit when working with large spreadsheets, power bi, or trying to multi task with multiple office apps open.

You don’t say if you need to use Teams but there is a Linux port of Teams, which is ok, not great, just ok. Personally run the web app of teams for chat on my Linux host and use Teams on my phone for meetings. Works much better for me.

Final thing to be aware of are the policies implemented by your company. Some require that your PC is “trusted” before you can fully connect to m365. This is far easier to work around with a Windows VM.

Mine is probably more of a combo of things to streamline my workflow than anything else.

I use Sways multiple workspaces to segregate my apps into different workspaces for different tasks on startup of that app using the assign function in my Sway config. For example VS Code and one particular Firefox window always goes to Workspace 3.

I use the Layman Sway scripts to force all my normal workspaces to different layouts that is appropriate for that function. So workspace 3 with VS Code and a Firefox window is set in a 75/25 split with VS Code set to always take the bigger share. I can switch the two sides from largest on the left to largest on the right, or swap the apps between the two splits, or make a window full-screen with simple keyboard shortcuts.

Odd workspaces are on my left monitor, even ones on the right. This coupled with per workspace wall paper (all my windows are translucent, not for everybody I know) and particular tasks locked to predefined workspaces means I am never hunting around for something. Even if I did lose something I can use rofi to switch to it. If its an essential app I can use my keyboard shortcut that I use to launch the app, switch to it using swayr by activating the shortcut again.

I have used QMK for my keyboard to reduce the number of keys I must use to activate most of my shortcuts, and move them to my number row and home row using layers, double taps, and holds. I try to layer up the same family of functions on the same key but on different layers, so for example, the VI arrow keys move between windows, resize windows, move windows, depending on which layer I have chosen.

Sway (and i3) you can assign windows to workspaces based on any property that is available in the swaymsg tree. It can do parital matches, so for example if you wanted your Lemmy firefox window to always start on workspace 3 you could use:

assign [title=“lemmy” app_id=“firefox”] workspace number $ws3

Title can use regex so you can do some pretty neat matching if you need it.