Now that pipewire is more mainstream, we don't have to worry about using
alsa or pulseaudio here which, from what I remember, took more effort
to set up.
There was actually an issue where waybar was using larger padding than
usual, which was fixed by setting the gsettings in our sway config. I
liked the padding changes introduced by the other theme, however, so
this change makes it permanent.
This was cool when we had KDE-specific applications, but since I'm
prioritizing ranger and nautilus now, dolphin isn't needed. Since I'm
focusing heavily on terminal and web-based applications, there is less
need to customize KDE applications specifically.
Two other advantages to this is that I no longer have to manually update
the colors in kdeglobals, and most if not all of the environment can be
programmatically set up with minimal effort.
Now sway behaves similarly to unclutter on bspwm/xorg, and we don't have
to worry about moving the cursor out of the way since it automatically
disappears.
Since ueberzug only works in X, and since ranger previews currently
conflict with tmux due to a new python version on arch linux, ueberzug
has no real advantage besides making image previews work in alacritty,
which I ultimately decided against due to how it handles fcitx input on
Xorg.
One of the conveniences of GNOME is auto-mounting. Although manually
mounting is a good learning exercise, we can improve productivity by
auto-mounting by default.
Looking back at this, meta packages should be one of the most convenient
ways to keep track of packages. It gets the job done and should be more
than sufficient for our use case.
In particular, installing all packages guarantees that we won't "miss
something" and have to install it manually, which is more useful than
having a lower package number count.
The main disadvantage is dealing with constant updates to large packages
in a restrictive internet environment, although it's possible to
mitigate this by separating the smaller packages from the larger ones.
This is mainly to get rid of the warning when using "git status" where
git doesn't exist when the current partition isn't the same as the root
partition.
This makes it so that mpv won't take up the entire screen when executed,
assuming it's dealing with a video resolution equal to or greater than
the current display.
This makes working with bspwm a lot cooler since the cursor is now
automatically hidden when not in use, making full screen videos and
other applications a lot more immersive.
Now it's possible to type "p" for paru instead of having to type
"pacman" or "sudo pacman". This is mostly for convenience, since I think
there's still some merit to typing things out the standard way.
Note that although it's possible to make fcitx work with alacritty as
well, the current implementation doesn't show what you're typing as
you're typing it, which is inconvenient.
Because of this, I recommend using kitty in all cases if switching input
methods is important for your use case. kitty also has the advantage of
image preview support on both xorg and wayland, since ueberzug does not
have wayland support.
Note that I previously set up a working environment with ibus-mozc
which, although was cool (and better than ibus-anthy), did not offer all
the benefits that fcitx provides. Now that I figured out how to make
fcitx work on both xorg and wayland, as well as in applications like
anki, this is my preferred input method for personal systems.
The default mpv settings use traditional rendering methods in order to
support older hardware. Since we're running on modern hardware, we can
take advantage of the higher quality settings that mpv offers.
This is similar to bspwm, except new workspaces aren't automatically
created and empty workspaces are skipped.
Although creating a script to handle this should be possible, sway
doesn't offer any real benefits to me since bspwm does everything that
sway can do with the addition of input method, image preview, and other
features being better supported on xorg.
To reiterate, I like the idea behind sway, however I am more fluent with
bspwm and xorg and prefer how windows are managed in bspwm. For software
that only works on wayland, sway is a lightweight alternative to
committing to a full-featured desktop environment like GNOME.
