The past couple weeks I jumped off Desktop Environments and started with i3 tiling window manger, which runs on X11. I kind of loved it, but after doing a little research, the internet seems to feel that Wayland (not X11) is the future, and i3 doesn’t run on Wayland. There is an alternative tiling window manager called Sway which does run on Wayland, so that’s what I went with.

By the way, Cyberpunk 2077 ran just fine on both tiling managers. I should also point out that I have an nVidia RTX card, which for linux is not great, but it does work. The main issue that made me throw my hands in the air, and actually give up, was running qemu/kvm for virtual machines. I’m 95% sure when I’m launching virt-manager, that there’s a prompt for root password that I just can’t see because Sway is not showing me the prompt.

I cannot remember if this was an issue on i3, I’m pretty sure it was not, but I was so angry I went back to gnome. I’ll probably revisit tiling managers in the future but right now I just want something that works. I did leave i3 on my laptop (integrated graphics, no nVidia) so I will see I will double check if qemu/kvm is having that issue, but I’m pretty sure it just works and/or displays the admin prompt.

By the way on sway, same issue when trying to use vmware-workstation. I hope I was just doing something wrong or missing a single config line in my configuration.nix. Another issue I was having was figuring out how to setup a bridge network connection to the virtual machines so I could pass data to the vm from other devices on my network. VMWare did this natively, easily, and that’s what I’m currently using to do that.

Something I was working on today was spinning up a fedora server in vmware-workstation and installing Splunk Enterprise on it, and then feeding syslog from my networking hardware to it. The data is flowing now and it’s pretty cool to see.