I’ve been on the fence since I’ve been trying Hyprland. What I want out of a window manager / DE is lots of window customization settings (borders, animations, etc.), & having configuration inside one file or one directory with hot-reloading (I’m switching from KDE since its config files all over the place). Hyprland is very popular among WM users with a large ecosystem, though I prefer stacking rather than tiling. I can make it work with some window rules, and shell scripts using hyprctl & jq.
I’m wondering how many little things I will need to fix / figure out. For instance, when I open the firefox bookmarks library with CTRL SHIFT O. When that window is open but not focused, and not on top, if I press CTRL SHIFT O again on a DE it comes back to the top, but not on Hyprland. I could probably find a fix for that?
I might be answering my own question but I really want to hear thoughts.
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.
Sway is definitely great for tabs. I tried it on Hyprland for a while and mixing tiling + tabs was horrendous, it was such a hassle to use that I just stopped trying to use tabs inside tiles after a while. I even tried the hy3 plugin to make Hyprland behave like i3 including tabs and it was better, but there were very annoying bugs… Tabs are the only bad thing I have to say about Hyprland though, otherwise it’s a great compositor. If you like dynamic tiling, obviously. Maybe the tabs have been improved since then, it was a year ago and I haven’t been following the updates since I switched back to Sway.
I don’t know if there are stacking compositors that allow you to tab windows together like Haiku does, maybe that would be closest to what op looks for since they prefer stacking?
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.