Wayland compositors: Sway, Hyprland and i3

In short: Under Wayland the compositor is window manager and display server at once. Besides GNOME and KDE there are lean tiling compositors such as Sway and Hyprland that arrange windows automatically and are operated by keyboard.

Tiling instead of dragging windows

A tiling window manager divides the screen into tiles automatically, without overlap. New windows take the free space. Almost everything is done by keyboard, see Window managers and tiling window managers.

The best known

• i3: classic for X11. Text-based configuration, very stable.
• Sway: i3-compatible replacement for Wayland. Whoever knows i3 feels at home immediately. Configuration in ~/.config/sway/config.
• Hyprland: Wayland compositor focused on animations, effects and strong customisability. High maintenance because settings change quickly.
• river, Niri and others: further, partly unusual concepts (for example scrolling columns).

What you need besides

A tiling compositor is not a full desktop. You add yourself:

1. Bar (Waybar), launcher (wofi, rofi, fuzzel)
2. Notifications (mako, dunst)
3. Screen lock (swaylock, hyprlock), wallpaper (swaybg)
4. Network and audio applets, screen sharing through portals (xdg-desktop-portal)

For whom?

Whoever likes keyboard control and enjoys building their environment. Whoever prefers “it just works” stays with GNOME or KDE Plasma. Settings can be saved as dotfiles.

See also: Display managers and login screen