Sway 1.0 released with swaynag, improved performance, major bug fixes and more!

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Yesterday, the team at Sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor released Sway 1.0, the first stable release of sway which is a consistent, flexible, and powerful desktop environment for Linux and FreeBSD. Sway 1.0 comes with a variety of features that improves performance and offers a better implementation of Wayland. This release is 100% compatible with i3, i3 IPC, i3-gaps and i3bar.

What’s new in Sway 1.0?

In this release, swayidle, a daemon for managing DPMS and idle activity has been added. This release comes with swaynag, an i3-nagbar replacement. With this release, the bindsym locked now add keybindings which work when the screen is locked. In this release, the command blocks are now generic and they work with any command. It is now possible to adjust the Window opacity with the opacity command. With this release, the border csd enables client-side decorations.

Sawy 1.0 comes with atomic layout updates that help in resizing windows and adjusting the layout. With this release, the urgency hints from Xwayland are also supported. The Output damage tracking in this release will help in improving CPU performance and power usage. The performance will be improved with Hardware cursors. In this release, Wayland, x11, and headless backends are now supported for end-users.

Major changes

This release will now depend on wlroots 0.5.
This release has dropped the dependency on asciidoc.
With Sawy 1.0, the experimental Nvidia support has been removed.
With this release, the swaylock is now distributed separately.

Major Bugs fixes

Issues related to xdg-shell have been fixed.
Issues related to Xwayland have been fixed.
Reloading config doesn’t cause crashes anymore.

Few users are excited about this news. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “Sway is absolutely incredible, it puts macOS, built by Apple’s army of engineers and dump trucks of money to shame in its simplicity, stability, and efficiency.” Few others are unhappy because of the tiling window manager. Another user commented, “I really don’t get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and instantly felt boxed in. There’s not enough room on the screen for everything I need to have opened and flip between, which is why I use an overlapping window manager in the first place.”

To know more about this news, check out the official announcement.