Sway Installation on Debian Bookworm

hi and welcome to the channel my name is Drew this is just a guy Linux and when I saw this poll on Brody Robertson's Community page a few days ago I thought you know what this is about what I expected because if I had to guess I would put more of bro's audience in the rolling release early adopter bucket than than the people that would be on my channel and so and it's not going to be it's not Apples to Apples because you see right here I've got he's got 9,000 votes and I put out a poll um about a day ago and it has 200 so not exactly the same but it made sense to me that this was going to be the majority at least on this particular uh poll because I would have thought that my people that watch my channel are more Debian and exor users than they were not Debian and whan users but this is a happy this is actually kind of a nice um result because I was not expecting it to be this High actually so I thought to myself what's the bridge and now granted I have to say that this group here you're going to be fine at least for another year at least for another year and maybe even another cycle because if I had to guess I would say that Debian 13 or Trixie which will be coming out in 2025 will probably I don't know this for sure but they probably will not eliminate exor from their repos or from their packages I think there will still be a choice there you know but so many of these like Fedora for example that are eliminating xorg altogether interesting so I have to kind of think what is that bridge right now and since I'm not using KDE or gnome it really puts it in one bucket and that would be sway now I did a video on sway when was that 11 months ago I think it was 11 months ago yeah I did this in oh almost exactly a year ago in fact and frankly this group of videos that I did on sway um is outdated and irrelevant at this point is simply because I was using Debbie in test in at the time and at the time it was Bookworm and now we've got Bookworm as the stable and so it's not the same at all so the installation method is going to be completely different so let's talk about the two major players in this space and the space being window managers on Wayland And yes I know they're supposed to be called compositors but you know it is to me it's a window manager regardless sway can run on Debian stable right right now today and hyperland can't so is it worth it to put sway on and I think it is actually so I'm going to be demonstrating that today now let me just talk about hyperland for a sec you're not going to be able to run it until 2025 on Debian stable even now when I think about the version that just came out you cannot run it on Debian testing easily so that is why the um the script that I wrote is actually using a version 35 as opposed to 36 or above because the Debian packages do not lend itself for even that next version of hyperland and they're going to continue to go up up up in the in the very near future so you can run version 35 but you can't run 36 at least easily at least easily so anyway let's get to sway installation today now what I'm going to do is I'm going to install Debian from scratch and it's going to take me about six minutes but here's the thing I'll put a time stamp in there but I am not going to talk the entire time I'm just going to slam through it and if you want to watch it that's up to you but it's not going to be like it's not going to be that enthralling let's put that way so I'm going to reboot into the um the installation here we go now I might talk occasionally but basically if you want to skip this that's totally fine so it's going to take like I said about six minutes but but there will be no stopping that's what time stamps are for right for X EXT Force fine for this you are listening it's I I'm using the 12.5 uh Debian installation media uh I can't actually wait for 12.6 I think this is one of the worst ones that we've had um so 12.6 is going to be I think vastly improved over 12.5 and mostly before uh drivers and and such especially NVIDIA drivers it's it's absolute crap oh this machine doesn't take Invidia drivers but my other one does until later this afternoon actually when I get a different video card okay for for I hope this is less than six minutes because that's not that important e okay here we go still um still going to this is still the installation basically so I'm going to DPG get micro tools so micro restart Z SW service and then that's good okay so let's install some sway so I'm going to go and get my um my Bookworm scripts at my GitHub book worm scripts okay and now let's go into bookor strips and let's LS now all of these are installation files basically um there's there's two that you should recognize one is the installer.app WM DK Window Manager dwm Q file or I3 as well as if you want to just install xfce as well and so a lot of the things that I like to have in terms of fonts and um EXA all kinds of stuff that I like these are the in this is a really quick and easy installation so that I can just get started really quickly rather than just kind of like uh install things one at a time so it just automates the process basic basically so let me just go ahead and close that but now there is a new uh there's two new scripts actually one is called sway install so it's micro sway install.sh okay now it's got dependencies but I wouldn't call them dependencies really but if you're going to install a lot of the tools that are underneath here um then you might need some of these files so these are really easy and small libraries that I think help in the process of um of Wayland so I just kind of put them in there and kind of clumped them all together it's not actually I wouldn't say they're all dependencies but for the purpose of this you might need these you know these libraries so I'm installing Sway wayar and the things that you see here I'm installing two terminals because I like to have one floating and one tiling and then which I could I know by the way I know that I could do both um with one terminal I just don't I choose not to do that okay uh grim and slurp is for it's like scrot uh and then I'm installing thunar because I like thunar Firefox a bunch of other things including pipewire and um and then these are a lot of the tools that I use including actually let me go ahead and just remove OBS because there's really no need for it here and I don't really need but I'm just going to leave it there for that and then what I'm going to install a couple different text editors all right I like leafpad even though it hasn't been actually um worked on in probably close to 10 years and I won't install cups I don't need this installed really for right for this video but you have a okay so down here there is a choice all right do you want to install the LIE console manager or sddm I'm gonna say sddm is a better choice although I am going to install lie just because I want to in this video all right but SDM would be I think the safer choice so I'm going to crl S to save contrl q and then let's run sway install now I'm going to get it started and there might be times where I pause the video and one of the reasons why is because I install nwg look and I do that from excuse me from the GitHub now it takes kind of a weird amount of time in order for it to kind of power through and do the installation so I will probably pause at least during that part of the uh of the install because it it's it's really weird that it takes that long but it does and you you might think hey it's failing but it's not it actually just takes that long to act to Crunch through it and uh do that installation now if you don't want nwg look uh because you don't want to use uh gtk icon themes or just themes then you don't need to install it at all uh I do because I like to use a couple themes really um because it's just a preference of mine and we'll get to that probably in a few minutes because I don't think the installation here is going to take that long okay but as we're going through this installation um I am going to pause now and we'll pick this back up as soon as the installation is complete so I've run through the process it's the installation is now complete and strangely I actually went back and watched the last portion of the video before I got to this and I recognized that the um the audio kind of cuts in and out and it's because I got a new microphone and I'm I'm not used to it yet so I kind of turn my head and it's it's not catching everything cleanly regardless it's a it's a learning process friends okay so it is done with this but let me go ahead and clear the screen and so this custom- sway. SSH let's look at that for a second okay custom uh Sway and what it's doing is it's it's downloading my DOT files and it's putting in my configuration files for wayar sway roofi and and you can see what it's actually doing okay now I'm going to go ahead and do that so that when we do log in it's going to show a custom um I sorry I almost said I3 and that would have been wrong uh it's it would it's going to show a custom sway configuration okay now if you don't want that if you just want stock sway then don't do this okay so but custom sway. sh and that's it okay now I also want to install um teal and that's basically just bringing in some um some images sorry some icons rather as well as some themes so it'll only take a minute to do that I'll probably put a time stamp in here so if you don't care about this then that's cool okay and I think that's it actually I mean I can install a bunch of other stuff like Discord or uh Thunderbird or neovim that would be fine as well but uh I don't think I don't think that's necessary so what we're going to do is Pudo reboot okay and it's going to go into the LIE console manager hopefully which is nice but not not Bulletproof by any stretch okay not Bulletproof okay well there you go and um so just so you know you can go to Shell here but I'm just going to e just simply log in and there is our configuration of uh Sway and let me just go ahead and actually let me close this and I'm going to use my uh super space to open up the um roofy whan roofy and I'm going to um appearance or gtk settings and I'm going to select this orcus and then go to icons and I'm going to select the dark Nord peel so now when I go and I open up my uh thunar it's going to be there and I'm just going to quickly um show hidden and then I want a list view because that's my preference and then I'm going to open up terminal which is super enter by the way uh thunar is uh super F again these are my configuration files so these are my key bindings as well let me go ahead and profiles edit and this is what I like to do I say scrolling no but let me go to appearance and the window sty is going to be borderless and back down to default general actually let me move that over let me close this super Q to close by the way and then I'm going to underline sauce regular and then let's go ahead and make that 14 and um color should be there there let me try to in transparent that a little bit and there you go so super enter and my tile my tile it comes up now let's go ahead and I'm going to hit Super E for um for Genie and I'm just going to go ahead and close this now what I want to do is let's open up the um the configuration files so I'm going to go to home contr H and let's open up config for Sway and it's in this directory called config DOD and default okay and let me change the font here let's just bump this up okay so the configuration is basically super simple but you're going to look at the shortcuts here and you're going to go oh okay that's how that works all right because you you need to know how certain things uh work now as well as as far as the um as far as certain um applications are concern you're going to see that they're supposed to be floating okay um now let me see if like Pabu control floats yep it does so we're we're good I just wanted to make sure um so you're going to look at these key bindings here super f is thunar super B is Firefox Super E for editor is Genie and so on and I've set a couple like uh key bindings to execute and that like for example if I wanted to open up I want it to go to workspace 8 that's again my preference and if you are you know this is a good starting point for those of you that want to change it up um and you can see that I'm using um um grim and slurp for screenshots I created a I created a screenshots directory um during the installation process so if I just hit print screen for example you could say Grim saved it to the screenshots and so I'm going to open up I go open and just say open up screenshots here and there is that um actually I will I will be editing that particular file because that's not exactly right okay but that'll before this becomes live that will be fixed okay but I'm just going to go and open up qgv and there there is that screenshot okay now colors and everything like that is something that can be um easily changed when you're looking at this section here um but let me go ahead and open up the only thing I really need is the wayar so I'm G to go into wayar and config and so all it's really doing is showing the clock and the window over here um the sway workspaces so let's just say you want to change it's like oh I really like this I want to use it for hyperland I think all that you really need to do is change two things this to hyperland and this way to hyperland and it should work it actually should just work like that okay so those are the things that you might be interested in um with regard to the way bar but it is very simple very short very simple and um and and and you get the idea as to how I like it just to be simple I guess the question is is this something I'm going to use or is this something you should consider using that's up to you obviously but am I going to use it maybe actually I think that it has some real benefits when it comes to longterm you know we're talking about longterm now I don't know what Debian stable is going to look like in 2025 you know when we're talking about Trixie being stable who knows is exor going to be phased out probably not actually um but their whan will get more and more mature and there will be more a reason to use it and because I think and I'm not going to be talking intelligently about the benefits of whalan over exor I just don't know all right but there is a reason why this is a this is the direction of Linux there's a reason for it okay so I guess what I'm saying is there's one there's only one right now that combines Debian stable and Wayland And is a tiling window manager and that is sway I think that I'm going to stick with Sway and but I will also have bspwm uh on the same machine in fact I made sure that I could do that just by looking at uh this particular test machine so I installed bspwm on a um on a pause and just so that I could show you you can run both now is there a benefit I don't know I mean what do I know but you know is there a cool Factor here that you can run sway or a whan compositor on Debian uh stable yeah I think there's some benefit to it you know I really do I think there is definitely some benefit to it what I mean as far as cool factor is it as cool as hyperland no but man it works really well it's stable so that's really what we're looking for as you know the very first thing we talked about was the difference between uh certain viewers are looking more at um at early adoption for certain things and then others are just don't care about early adoption just want things to work and be stable I think you actually get a little bit of both in this particular type of scenario so Debian stable sway Wayland I think I think it it makes a lot of sense anyway thanks for watching and I'll talk to you soon

Channel: JustAGuy Linux

Views: 5,047

Keywords: linux, linux distros, computer software, linux installation guide, sway, debian, bookworm, wayland, exa, timeshift

Id: pv6Px6eATho

Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024