I’ve dabbled with Linux over the years, first with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, then Elementary OS when that dropped, and a few years ago I really enjoyed how customizable the gui was with Xubuntu. I was able to make it look just like WIndows 2000 which was really cool.
Which current distro has the best GUI, in your opinion? I find modern Ubuntu to feel a little basic and cheap. I guess I don’t really like modern Gnome. I’m currently using Windows 10 LTSC which is probably the best possible version of Windows, but I’d jump to linux if I could find a distro with a gui that feels at least as polished and feature rich as Windows 10 LTSC.
I’m not aware of any distro that ships this by default yet, but Hyprland is my favorite visually so far. Excited for it to continue to develop. I’m sticking with Sway for now, Hyperland’s grouping isn’t nearly as extensive as Sway’s tabbing and stacking, hopefully that will come eventually, but Hyprland sure does look amazing.
oh, i will have to give Hyprland a try! i was using Sway for a while, until i switched to gnome, and then KDE, because of growing pains with screensharing (which might be fully gone by now, i should give it another try)
Screen sharing pains aren’t completely gone in Sway, unfortunately. I can usually share my entire screen successfully, on a handful of programs at least, but that isn’t super helpful since I have an ultrawide screen. The other party can never really see anything clearly. Hyprland supposedly does have window sharing in addition to full screen sharing though, so that’s huge.
But yea even just a few days ago I tried to shift + video call in Element for a screen share in Sway and Element just crashed, had to hop on i3 for that.
Same here. I even switched to hyprland until the split stopped working like how it used to in sway. Quickly switching between tabbed and split was a key part of my sway workflow and the way that it’s done in hyprland now as far as I know, isn’t really cutting it.
So splits on Hyprland used to work more similarly to Sway, and they purposely moved away from it?
I’m not sure if it was on purpose or they just didn’t implement it to the correct spec.
The behaviour I want is this: I have say A and B on a desktop split into half vertically. Then I press a key and they become tabbed. I have A on one half and B and C on the other half split horizontally, then pressing a key makes B and C tabbed.
What happens in hyprland is this: you select a given window to be a tab parent. Then you can open an new window to make the two tabbed. However if you switch from tabbed to non tabbed, you can’t go back with a key combo. You need to repeat the whole process.
It’s such a small thing but has made hyprland kind of weird for me.
I have to remind myself to check on Hyprland again too, I’m on the same boat, currently on sway.
My main gripe with i3/sway is how you don’t have an easy way to just go to the next window in the workspace… I just want to have a couple of shortcuts for cycling back and forth in the window list (regardless of how that list is ordered). The 4-directional approach i3/sway takes messes up with my keybinding workflow and if you have floating windows it makes it very awkward to try and select them, to the point that I end up using the mouse a lot more than I’d need to.