Will be doing a fresh install on an old laptop in the near future and was considering trying wayland.
Can you recommend a decent & light window manager & terminal emulator?
I've played around with wayland but always ended up back on xorg, was gonna give it another shot.
stacking wm -> wayfire
tiling wm -> sway [corrected, i don't know what was going through my mind]
terminal emulator -> alacritty or foot
Sway is a tiling wm and wayfire looks like a floating wm to me. I don’t know what a „stacking“ wm is, but afaik you can stack in sway.
thanks for the correction, i don't what i was thinking while writing that. i guess i couldn't decide floating or stacking for wayfire so the whole thing broke down :)
Most of my machines are KDE on X, but I have one where I've been feeling stuff out in Wayland-land. The most appealing thing I've tried has been Hyprland with Waybar. It's a little bit of a kit in traditional WM fashion, but easy to configure from straightforward config files, fairly light, and not "Just like this X WM, but broken because of missing Wayland functionality" (I know, I know, it's not technically Wayland deficiencies, its "not yet complete extensions", because it's all extensions, the Wayland protocol itself does almost nothing).
I've been using Kitty for a terminal emulator and it's pleasing as well.
I haven't found a launcher I love, I have fuzzel right now and the only major issue is it doesn't currently support mouse interaction, and I prefer a "use whichever input device your hand is on at the time" to keyboard-only.
How does hyperland configuration compare to sway? Or is it exactly the same?
They're both simple text formats, but Hyprland uses a "key = value" type config with section labels. Sway is largely compatible with i3 config files which are more like an unstructured script.
I like sways configuration file more because the naming on hyprland isn't stellar. But hyprland has a config for anything I'd ever need which is awesome.
Labwc is really a decent window manager that can pretty much be used on its own without a panel (I think). I think foot is pretty fast, but I just use gnome console, because I'm a savage.
I like puppy linux as a distro for old laptop refurb, starts lean and mean, allowing older laptops to recapture some of their former glory.
Void is my plan. I went with Fedora last time as I couldn't be bothered setting up Void properly and Fedora was the only distro with a generic kernel that seemed old mac trackapd/keyboard friendly at time. I've not tried Puppy for a long time, I tend to opt for AntiX or Porteus in that kinda area.
Try RedoxOS: https://www.redox-os.org/faq/
If you're into developing or willing to learn Rust, it can even offer you a paid summerjob. RedoxOS runs even on Pentium III.
Cheers, looks interesting but don't think it can cover my daily drivers needs.
