💡 Support users who like GUIs

[xeruf]

Summary

My friend is giving Manjaro Sway another go, but he is inexperienced when it comes to configs, and I have to concur that reading up on them all the time before writing them is no faster than reaching for the mouse. So we should either preinstall some GUIs (they don't harm people who don't use them) or create really intuitive TUIs (which for some reason are rare, I dunno if everybody just writes his private helpers or if most people really type out those command sequences like lsblk + mount or swaymsg -t get_inputs + swaymsg input ... by hand...)

Drawbacks

Potential confusion through conflicting configs.

Implementation idea

So I would like to propose preinstalling these packages and adding .desktop-files with appropriate aliases so users find them:

• sway-input-config aka Keyboard Layouts aka Mouse and Trackpad
• swaysettings-git (would need config adjustments on includes: https://github.com/ErikReider/SwaySettings#install) aka Sway System Settings aka Bluetooth Manager aka User Management aka Default Applications aka Wallpaper Configurion (basically linking to every unique module not available otherwise, like on other desktop environments)
• nwg-displays --outputs_path $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sway/config.d/outputs.nwg-displays.conf (using that filename so it takes precedence over a potential outputs.conf) aka Display Management aka Monitor Screens

Though we have to make sure to avoid confusion here - sway-input-config has more detailed keyboard settings, but swaysettings-git has a module for basic keyboard layout management as well.
I also just found https://github.com/nwg-piotr/nwg-shell-config which we should definitely check out.

Will you be able to contribute a PR for this?

• Yes I will be able to get that feature a lot quicker.

[boredland]

I like the idea. ngw-shell-config looks pretty nice - perhaps we could make a more detailed plan once you tried it out?

[xeruf]

good point, we will try when there is room again

[xeruf]

Maybe it is time for us to embrace nwg-shell completely and maybe even consider hyprland?
I for one are not married to sway ^^ https://nwg-piotr.github.io/nwg-shell/

[boredland]

If I wanted a full-fledged gnome-like session, why shouldn't I use Gnome? Hyperland looks interesting tho, but well, that probably is another distro.

[xeruf]

well, what I really like is the keyboard-first and tiling-first approach, which I do not think GNOME fulfills

[boredland]

We could explore installing hyprland in parallel. Has anyone got a basic config that we could use as a starting point? I could imagine we could try to rebuild the whole look&feel of manjaro sway relatively easily on hyprland, at least it doesn't look too different and ppl seem to use mainly the same tools around it.