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Comment by desmap | Hacker News Reader

I was one or two years on Arch with i3 and all was great except when an app (eg a browser or Inkscape) opens a dialogue/modal/popup or whatever and this got stretched over the entire pane, yuck. AFAIK this could be configured somehow but I found configuration not as mature and rock-solid as with tmux or nvim but good though. It was rather a rabbit-hole.

While I prefer the paradigm of tiling wms I eventually stuck with Windows (and WSL2) with its built-in window management but yeah.

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That's odd, I've been using i3 for years now and modals always open as a floating window. Even GIMP (and its many windows) works fine. I don't remember tweaking anything in particular to make it work.

Nice to hear and need to try it again. I stopped using it 2017. Another gripe I had with i3 was that setting up proper hidpi support was a mess, maybe this improved as well. I know that the latest Ubuntu got here quite well, allowing also 25% steps etc.

Hidpi is still a total crapshoot on linux (depending on distro and window manager).

My current setup uses xrandr to scale my 4k to 1440p.

It's not perfect, but it's better than other options.

Yeah hidpi on Linux is pretty underwhelming and it seems that nobody really cares. I think Windows needed years to match macOS and is now on the same level. Still Windows notebooks barely have more then 200dpi unless there are from the premium segment. Whatever, at least the software side is great now. But on Linux, Ubuntu just had until last year hidpi only in 100% steps paired with dozens of glitches here and there. Sad since especially a terminal looks just terrific in 300dpi (UHD on 13" or 8k on 32").

I think you're probably right, but my experience (Sway on Arch) has been nothing other than pretty excellent.

It supports fractional scaling and different scales for different attached screens.. You have to tell the system you want it (`swaymsg 'output <x> scale 1.5'`) but it works.

Just checked out Sway's intro video, this looks promising! Would you mind to elaborate if Sway is ready for being a daily driver + how is multi-monitor support (all monitors same dpi and also with different dpi levels).

I’ve been using it as a daily driver for 2-ish years professionally. I have crashed it but those were super rare.

You still need Xwayland installed for some stuff though. Most tools have adequate wayland replacements.

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