It happened again - this time on my Fedora machine! I ended up with a laptop that won’t boot after some package changes. Last time that happened was ~ 4 years ago when Arch Linux could not decrypt my main partitions due to some changes on a crypto library. This time the accident was caused by a simple dnf command:
dnf autoremove
I intended to remove dangling packages from my system - expecting my package manager to know which packages are needed and which not. Unfortunately some really important packages (amongst some legacy packages) were removed. My laptop was not even able to start any boot loader - it booted straight to the device diagnosis application that the hardware manufacturer ships.
Maybe some day in your Linux career you’ve heard of “tiling window managers”. I’ve (more or less) ignored them for many years, because I was happy with Gnome Shell and the “normal” way of handling applications on my screen. But when I started my new Linux job, there were no native Linux machine available for my work, so I had to use VirtualBox with its bad graphics performance. Using Gnome, KDE or any other Desktop environment was not really practical.
To get reasonable performance I needed a very lightweight windows manager with no effects and no other fancy stuff, so I ended up giving tiling window managers a try. Since then I’ve used i3 window manager at my job’s workspace. On my private laptop I chose for “Sway”, because it natively supports the Wayland window protocol (and I like Wayland ;-) ). Sway is quite similar to i3, e.g. basic window control keys are almost the same. Still there are some differences, such as configuration of keyboard and mouse.
In this article I’ll show you some parts of my personal Sway configuration and point out several tools that will be useful in your daily work. This is no complete guide which goes into details of installing every tool! Instructions for installation can be found on the projects' websites.