maybe, he mentioned stacked mode on a tiling compositor, which is valid, but that’s not a thing on stacking compositors… BTW, the stack mode on sway doesn’t mean it turns into a stacking compositor, rather it means tabbed mode with the tabs stacked vertically. But the OP knows better.

You might try tabbed mode instead of stacking mode. It’s great, as mentioned in some comment I made, I’m not a tiling guide, but the tabbed mode on sway is great. I would guess it’s available on hyprland since it borrows some concepts from sway. However if you find a lot of trouble on hyprland enabling it (I guess you shouldn’t) you might try sway. Beware you need exceptions because otherwise everything shows up maximized, but that’s not hard byt reading the man pages, compositor documentation, and looking around on the web. BTW, on sway this global config gives tabbed mode on all workspaces: workspace_layout tabbed and of course you can chenge it to stacking, or tiling whenever you want on any workspace…

I’m not a tiling guy, and the tabbed mode on sway seems to me like the best I’ve used. I believe it’s a much better experience than stacking compositors by a lot. Having a tab bar, and everything maximized to it (except what I consider is better off floating) is the best I’ve experienced. Stacking mode is the same just that is uses too much space by stacking the tabs, so I really don’t like stacking mode. So sway tabbed mode, in combination with a tiling concept of a workspace per particular objective (I use 10) and a simple bar (yamber) has no alternative on the stacking spectrum of compositors.

BTW, if going with a stacking compositor, I recommend labwc instead. I found a smoother and way more stable experience than wayfire (some functionality stops working often like sunset functionality, and usually way behind on wlroots support, not a take on wayfire devs, just that I find it more unstable than labwc).

Of course I’m biased towards less eye candy, though I still appreciate the equivalent to basic picom/compton on the Xorg world, which is the norm on any wayland compositor AFAIK.

Of course using another distro you want to emulate is much better.

But as it’s debian based, I’m wondering if a better approach would be to use repos from another close enough distro, like derivative distros which decide to build the stuff for the distro as much as possible (that maybe won’t prevent the need of flatpak and the like).

Another approach would be using a package manager that can work on top of any distro, like Guix, at least for FLOSS software.

I use artix, so if something is not in the official artix repos pacman also look on arch repos, then it looks my personal repos (I build some personal packages, but I also use aurutils, so there are packages on one of my personal repos that are really aur packages not mine). As I prefer to package the stuff I can’t find anywhere I haven’t found the need for something like Guix, but it might come handful if in order to include some software which depends on software way old for artix or something similar to that. Just a reminder that Guix and the like will work fine as package mechanism on top of any distro given their approach to keep the software out of the common unix path hierarchy.

Tiling widow managers are popular, but they’re definitely a taste.

Oh, I refer to that in your post. To me all WMs/compositors are a matter of taste, including stacking ones (on wayland from the stacking ones I only like labwc though it’s xml config is not what I would prefer). And you already clarified, but it gave me the impression that it was implicit that tiling was a matter of taste, when those WMs/compositors also offer tabbed/stacked mode, which to me it’s not tiling at all, and offers something really appealing not so easily to achieve on any stacking WM/compositor.

Regarding config, well yes, if one is looking for no config at all, and still get the WM/compositor to be useful and also to one’s liking, then that’s hard to find. But the config files once achieving what one likes and is productive with, then one barely looks at it again, and they are usually portable (usually not only across PCs, also across distros).

But I got your point, sort of “plug and play” as they said before, just install it and without any config be productive with it… I can’t imagine that. I heard river is pretty close to dwm, but I can’t tell much about it. The river idea of dynamic tiling, which seems to be the default doesn’t really appeal to me, so I would need to do tabbed mode any ways, which doesn’t seem to be the default, so at least for me it wouldn’t be that configless… But maybe it would be to dynamic tiling people.

well, for me there’s no need for eye candy. I’m happy with sway and its tabbed mode.

BTW, labwc is sort of the openbox for wayland, in case interested

See tabbed mode on sway. Not all tiling compositors are about just tiling, :)

If you’re not into tiling, but still want several of the advantages of sway, it offers a couple of additional modes, stacked and tabbed. I really loved tabbed setting some things to be floating. It’s like it sounds, it offers a horizontal tab with all windows within per workspace, maximized below the tabs… Stacked is similar but it stacks the tabs vertically. If you’d tell me before a tiling compositor has such functionality I wouldn’t have believed it. I like it better than stacking compositors, :)

I guess there was an attempt to move away from the email flow, to allow more people to contribute (I read that was part of the motivation), perhaps that made sourcehut (although it’s in their plan, it hadn’t become their highest priority) not an option, however both can be self hosted (that’s what I would have expected from an organization as the Guix one, so that there’s no dependency on a cloud service, as good as it might be), and both have really good TOS and are non profit. But cloud services are still something its users/clients do not really own. Perhaps as I understood, savannah will still be used as a mirror, but not just temporally, rather for good, so that if something happens on the cloud, there’s plan B available… That’s why for such big and important project I would have preferred a self hosted service. But oh well, I’m not part of the decision, and not an user yet, hopefully to become one later on when getting some minimal understanding of both guile and guix configuration (still guile but I believe simpler), because no matter the distro I always have to write and maintain a few packages myself. Hopefully at some point doesn’t become never having the time to do so, hehe.

So all in all yes, the two best cloud options by far, but I’m surprised a Guix instance was not chosen, not sure if even considered.

It would have been better to self host forgejo, rather than trusting a cloud git service using forgejo. But to be honest, its TOS, as well as the sourcehut’s TOS which I even like it better, sound way better than GH’s…

I’m curious about which programs if you can share. I write few bash scripts which used to call sudo, and I replace sudo with doas in those. And in case of muscular memory I also added a bash alias so that if by mistake calling sudo in reality I’d be calling doas. So far no issues. O course I don’t use fancy args, and what I really needed from sudo I used to include it in /etc/sudoers and now on /etc/doas.conf, and I believe I couldn’t include a couple of options but they were not critical since I’ve lived without them so far. And it’s weird to find actual software that requires sudo, perhaps proprietary software. One can actually live without sudo and without doas, as long as there’s still su.

Not judging, rather curious, actually I’ve met several guys who write scripts which would benefit from using sudo/doas, but they claim better call the scripts through sudo/doas rather than adding them as dependencies.

A way smaller alternative therefore less prompt to vulnerabilities is OpenDoas found on Arch/Artix/… and other distros. From the GH project:

doas is a minimal replacement for the venerable sudo. It was initially written by Ted Unangst of the OpenBSD project to provide 95% of the features of sudo with a fraction of the codebase.

Are you sure?

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Bootloader-Configuration.html

There’s Guix sytem running on top of linux, so you don’t need to wait for hurd, :)

Guix is source base rolling release if you plan to keep it up to date weekly, so I don’t know why you feel it so distant from Gentoo. Binaries updates are still rolling released but their pace is slower.

Well, before wayland I always used fluxbox (eventually with picom compositor, which previously was compton). Then now on wayland I’m using sway with fuzzel, yambar and others.

I’ve always felt both gnome and kde, as well as most other DEs really bloated. Gnome used to be more stable on wayland, and as of Today with better support for nvidia AFAIK, but KDE is quickly catching up.

Not sure why the hate on gnome (and I guess on GTK as well). It doesn’t offer all the customization by default, but you can get it through extensions while available. But on KDE one really needs to see a pletora of dependencies each time one adds a simple module or application. Both are improving gradually to become less intense on resources being KDE more advanced on that.

But hey, both are bloated compared to non full DE compositors such as sway or labwc. BTW I use sway with tabbed mode (not actually tiling) and some tweaks, and I prefer that over stacking compositors, but if wanting one labwc is pretty cool.

On X11 there’s a huge amount of window managers plus compositors plus several other applications which altogether can give a similar sense to a DE but way less intense on resources, and for sure way less bloated. To me DEs are overrated to answer your title, but perhaps that’s just me, :)

I know most don’t care. I initially stated most people don’t agree with me. This is just my take on universal packages in general. I really like and appreciate the typical shared libraries native to most distros. It’s OK we disagree, I only hope we don’t end up with empty shells with systemd and everything else on app stores…

I installed liri-shell, and some other apps some time back, and totally disliked the experience. Too many duplicated stuff, which was totally unnecessary. While I can, I void universal packagers.

I’m not complaining about open source, I’ve been using FLOSS for so many years now. The thing with developers only supporting universal packages distributed binaries is that the build recipes might be too tight to them, or not explicitly exposing all dependencies, and several other things. I have no issues building and installing software. So that’s not it. All I said was that to me closing bugs because not using the universal package supported is sort of crazy, being open source and supposedly being able to build and distribute. I didn’t say I couldn’t support myself.

I’ve tried in the past flatpak packages, they are terrible in many senses the proponent (vast majority AFAIK) don’t say, among them:

• They create huge static binaries
• One gets many libraries embedded in the static libraries or local static libs to the package which are often repeated among many static binaries, even the same version of them. This is totally avoided when building against dynamic native libraries.
• When installing a pletora of static dependencies for a package, lets say liri, a bunch of the stuff it requires might already bi installed natively in your system, but they need the static deps locally part of the package.
• Care must be applied, there are statistics available about abuse on vulnerabilities infection on pypi, npm and so on, this no different on these packagers repos/hubs.

Good that they provide an alternative way to install packages not available in your distro repos, but for that user repositories building against native libraries are a much better option, like AUR in the case of Arch, and even their binary packages coming from other distros or from upstream might be even better than those universal static binaries providers.

There are political aspects involved in the past claim from the proponents, and it’s that in their view gnu+linux echo-system should become like the windows one, where everyone company or org (to them doesn’t matter) should be able to provide their binary packages, and then there’s no reason to think of anyone being able to build their staff.

There’s a tendency actually on providers on those hubs, to ignore problems on people who tries to build their stuff on their own, claiming they only support those universal packages. Which to me it’s dangerous, since it goes in detriment to the ability to build and distribute the software, which might not be due to licenses, but rather practical reasons. This might actually be against the licenses they use, but now a day who cares, right, it’s available on that packager repo…

Lastly one argument provided in favor of the apps coming from those universal packages is sandboxing. But there’s firejail which can be install on most gnu+linux distributions, and comes with profiles for a pletora of apps, and if sandboxing is not enough, it can easily be combined with apparmor, or if you prefer selinux might be used… No need for those universal packages to have a sandboxed experience.

One final note, so far gnu+linux has been characterized by having a diversity, which is good, that diversity offers people options to choose from, and a lot of different solutions for different purposes. Not so long ago the claim was that it was not good, that meant fragmentation, and fragmentation is bad for adoption and maintenance. I see it the other way around, this diversity allows for choosing for what aligns better with the user intends, like easy to use, or rolling release, or as vanila as possible, or as up to date as possible, or as hardened as possible, etc, etc. Systemd is another example of this universalization intended. Perhaps some distros prefer to be a shell for systemd and get packages just from universal packages, that’s bad news to me.

Of course having universal packagers present an oportunity for corps and orgs to also provide stuff on the gnu+linux platform, but in my mind the best would be for them to offer free/libre and open source software, that would build on any system and be provided by any packager that wants to offer it. Though I believe that to be too idealistic perhaps. Jeje.