This is a very brief post covering the installation of the Sway window manager (WM) on Fedora. The base system was installed previously with the Gnome desktop environment (DE) and as such won’t cover some aspects such as login manager etc. There will be further posts detailing some customisation options and useful additions.

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor replacement for i3. If you have used i3 before your config will be usable in Sway. To learn more visit the Sway website.

Part 0 - Prerequisites

Have a working up-to-date Fedora install or whichever other distro you use. If building from source, check the dependencies first. Sway is in the Fedora repos so we will be installing from there.

Note: If you aren’t already familiar with Sway or i3 key bindings I suggest taking a quick look at the documentation before switching from your current DE/WM.

Part 1 - Installing Sway

Install Sway and other Sway packages using:

$ sudo dnf install sway swaybg swayidle swaylock

Part 2 - Switching to Sway

Logout of the Gnome DE and login using Sway. To do this press the settings icon in the bottom right of the login menu and select Sway before entering your password.

You should now be logged in and using Sway, have use the official documentation to guide you into using it.