Sway

Raised as a usability problem by 29 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 24 threads.

People raised many different problems with Sway, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 30 complaints

Sway refuses to use the configured keyboard layout despite repeated attempts2026-08-21
Fractional scaling only enlarges the base resolution, so the user can't arrange three displays as wanted2026-06-03
Must wait about 45 seconds after login or layout breaks and focus gets hijacked2026-01-22
Too much time wasted customising and organising windows; some apps' odd UI toolkits become unusable2025-10-20
Needs a lot of manual window management to get windows working well2025-03-13
Cursor missing at first, laggy software cursor, and extreme flickering on Nvidia2024-05-20
Sway/Wayland has glitchy display, screen sharing, and focus behavior that breaks workflows2024-03-30
Keyboard input goes to a window other than the one shown as focused2024-02-24
Login silently fails and returns to login screen with no error message2023-08-02
Sway looks broken or unusable on high-DPI screens due to a missing feature2023-05-01
Users must write their own scripts to handle idle and color warmth toggling2023-02-25
Needs hours of undocumented environment variable and config fiddling to get basic apps working2022-09-19
Screen sharing only works per whole screen, not individual windows2022-09-19
Ran into too many frustrating issues while using it daily2022-07-30
Can hardly ever move windows where wanted using the keyboard2022-01-15
Logs into a blank screen with no indication of what to do next2021-12-05
Chrome and Electron apps show blurry text when display scaling is not 1.02021-04-10
Drag and drop and focus switching randomly break with Xwayland windows2021-04-09
Pressing Ctrl+C after Sysrq+R often kills sway by accident2021-03-10
Couldn't figure out how to get inertial scrolling working2020-06-08
Resizing by corner adjusts both dimensions at once, unlike the preferred per-axis method2019-09-03
Fullscreen windows and dialogs appear on random monitors or spaces, disrupting workflow2019-03-12
Scaling and input break for X11 applications under HiDPI, degrading the experience2019-03-11
No copy-paste support makes it a non-starter for the commenter2019-03-11
Cycling through many windows via alt-tab shown as icons or screenshots is terrible to use2019-03-11
Can't find a way to set floating windows' title bars by default2018-10-21
Must use mouse or trackpad because tiling isn't available on their OS2017-10-19
Display setup requires hand-editing a config file instead of using a GUI2017-03-21
Keyboard scrolling does not work on the Sway web page2014-10-01
Loaders and bad UX make the app feel poor to use2014-10-01