The release of the Ubuntu Sway Remix 23.04 distribution is now available, providing a pre-configured and ready-to-use desktop based on the mosaic composite manager Sway. This distribution is an unofficial edition of Ubuntu 23.04, designed for both experienced GNU/Linux users and beginners who wish to try out a tiling window manager environment without the hassle of lengthy configurations. Builds are prepared for amd64 and arm64 architectures (Raspberry Pi).
The distribution's environment is based on Sway — a compositing manager that uses the Wayland protocol and is fully compatible with the i3 tiling window manager, as well as the Waybar panel, PCManFM-GTK3 file manager, and utilities from the NWG-Shell project, such as the desktop wallpaper manager Azote, fullscreen application menu nwg-drawer, screen output utility for script contents nwg-wrapper (used to display hotkey hints on the desktop), GTK theme, cursor, and font manager nwg-look, and the Autotiling script, which automatically arranges windows of open applications like dynamic tiling window managers.
The distribution includes both graphical applications such as Firefox, Qutebrowser, Audacious, Transmission, Libreoffice, Pluma, and MATE Calc, as well as console applications and utilities like the Musikcube music player, MPV video player, Swayimg image viewer, Zathura PDF viewer, Neovim text editor, Ranger file manager, and others.
Another feature of the distribution is the complete abandonment of the Snap package manager; all programs are provided as standard deb packages, including the Firefox web browser, for which the official PPA repository from the Mozilla Team is used. The installer of the distribution is based on the Calamares framework.
Key Changes:
- Sway has been updated to version 1.8, featuring support for the 'bindgesture' command to attach actions to touchpad gestures, support for the Wayland xdg-activation-v1 and ext-session-lock-v1 extensions, and the configuration option 'disable while trackpointing' in the libinput library to manage touchpad disabling while using a trackpoint joystick (such as the TrackPoint on ThinkPad laptops).
- Two basic touchpad gestures have been added: a three-finger swipe left or right to switch between desktops, and a three-finger swipe down to toggle the focused window to floating mode and back.
- A start-sway script has been added, allowing for automatic detection of the environment launch in virtual machines or on systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers by applying the necessary environment variables and launch parameters. For example, when detecting the Nvidia driver and having NVIDIA DRM Modeset enabled, the script automatically exports the required environment variables and starts Sway with the '--unsupported-gpu' parameter, redirecting the launch log to the systemd journal.
- A background process, Swayr, has been introduced to enhance window management capabilities. It allows switching between active windows with the Alt+Tab combination, switching between desktops with the Alt+Win combination, and displaying a list of all windows across all desktops and monitors with the Win+P combination.
- Support for changing monitor color temperature (Night Color) has been implemented using the wlsunset utility. The color temperature changes automatically based on location (this setting can be modified in the Waybar panel's configuration file or directly in the launch script).
- A Scratchpad module has been added to the Waybar panel for quick access to windows moved to the scratchpad (temporary storage for inactive windows).
- The Swappy utility has been added for interactive editing of screenshots before saving to disk or copying to the clipboard.
- The utility for configuring input devices, Sway Input Configurator, has been updated with a new interface for language and keyboard layout settings. Some bugs have been fixed, and compatibility with the latest Sway releases has been ensured.
- Configuration files have been refactored, autostart settings have been simplified, and issues with dark themes in GTK applications have been resolved. For applications with a HeaderBar, window control buttons are disabled. AppImage applications without Wayland support can now run automatically using XWayland. The image size has been reduced. The base installation now excludes systemd-oomd (replaced with EarlyOOM), GIMP, and Flatpak.
Source: opennet.ru
