i3 VS wslg

Compare i3 vs wslg and see what are their differences.

wslg

Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios (by microsoft)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
i3 wslg
200 141
9,025 9,682
1.4% 1.0%
7.6 6.1
3 days ago 15 days ago
C C++
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

i3

Posts with mentions or reviews of i3. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-19.
  • Show HN: Chrome Reaper
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2023
    While I believe Memory Saver was a great improvement, it only works if the tab is hidden or the window minimized. I recently learned the required state is not triggered if the tab is open but on another virtual desktop. At least this is the case with many of not all Linux window managers. Some of the many discussion threads on the topic:

    https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4353

  • Firefox 121 defaults to Wayland on Linux
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2023
    > This is very true, and unfortunately there are very few people working on linux accessibility (including not me! I am part of the problem!).

    Accessibility work itself ironically suffers from an accessibility problem. I brought up i3wm above, the issue for that is pretty illuminating: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393

    It's not that the devs are saying "this doesn't matter", the devs behind one of the most popular tiling window managers in the X11 ecosystem are saying, "this does matter, but we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what changes we'd need to make to get Orca working."

    It's a really fundamental breakdown that's kind of a tragedy because I honestly believe that if accessibility communities were more heavily baked into testing and development in Linux and if this wasn't treated like two separate worlds, it would be better for everyone -- fixing accessibility concerns very often improves interfaces across the board and makes them more powerful.

    But... how do you bridge that gap? I don't really know, I tried looking into Orca to see what would need to happen here and bounced off of it pretty hard, it's not a very approachable tech stack and there aren't tutorials or getting started guides. And on the other side of the issue I can preach about needing accessibility input during interface design, but I'm not in a position to give specific advice because I don't use screenreaders or alternate control schemes and I don't know what the biggest problems are.

    The people who need to be involved in that process can't get involved because there's a tech barrier in place even for technically inclined people, and because the underlying software locks them out from the start. i3wm isn't ever going to get someone who's intimately familiar with Orca to jump into the conversation because the people who need to use Orca can't use i3wm. So that leaves the people who can address that tech barrier, but they don't know what to do or how to approach the problem because of the lack of involvement and because the communities are isolated from each other. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem and I don't know how to solve it.

  • "We understand" ;)
    2 projects | /r/discordapp | 9 Dec 2023
    This is partially why i use tools like i3 (/ sway). i like the tool; it works extremely well for me; the design has stayed the same for 20 years; there's no profit motive to come along and fuck everything up. it just works. it is boring in the best way possible.
  • egui_overlay - A transparent Overlay window where you can only click the "egui parts"
    3 projects | /r/rust | 4 Jun 2023
    for example, take i3. https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4478
  • How to start on a Linux desktop environment?
    2 projects | /r/osdev | 4 Jun 2023
  • What's the difference between Gnome and KDE? Do applications written for one work in the other?
    2 projects | /r/linux4noobs | 22 May 2023
    Some window managers are meant to be used as-is, and provide a minimalist yet functional environment that use very little resources or give power users an almost HUD-like interface. Examples of those window managers are OpenBox and i3wm for X, and Weston and Hyprland for Wayland
  • I created a side file tree picker workaround for Helix Editor in i3
    2 projects | /r/HelixEditor | 22 May 2023
    i3, https://i3wm.org
  • tiling window manager
    2 projects | /r/linux4noobs | 20 May 2023
    I did use i3 exclusively for a few years. The reasons I chose it were
  • i3 vertical dock
    2 projects | /r/i3wm | 10 May 2023
    I don't think you can with base i3. See this open issue on the subject: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/1129
  • best lightweight linux distro for old laptop and gaming
    3 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 26 Apr 2023
    well, it depends. It was better experience than FreeBSD 7.2 that's for sure. :) It was running Xorg with https://i3wm.org, a web-server, XMPP-server, PostgreSQL, few bots and dovecot / postfix (e-mail server). It was doing fine routing internet for 2PCs and a WiFi router for 10 years until its HDD died. For gaming... erm... I was able to play something like Theme Hospital or Syndicate Wars in dosbox. You have to understand any OS is just software it doesn't make magic. With minimalistic Desktop Environment like Xfce, LXDE or even barebones i3wm you can put your hardware to use with Arch Linux.

wslg

Posts with mentions or reviews of wslg. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-28.
  • FreeRDP: A Remote Desktop Protocol Implementation
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Sep 2023
    WSLg(Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI) uses RDP and FreeRDP to work: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

    I haven't tried it yet, but I'm hopeful the experience is better than last time I tried Hyper-V enhanced linux experience. I imagine this use case is getting FreeRDP way more attention.

    For years I've developed in a Linux VM on a Windows host via VirtualBox. The typing lag on this, particularly in IDEs like VSCode and Rider, finally got to me. So, I moved over to WSL and have to say; the experience is amazing.

  • Wayland Is Pretty Good
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jun 2023
    This is running in WSL?

    Microsoft has some wayland stuff already for WSL, though I think internally there's RDP involved: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

  • I tried
    11 projects | /r/pcmasterrace | 11 Jun 2023
    What are you talking about? Its free forever https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
  • The world if Windows was POSIX compliant
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 24 May 2023
    Actually, you can https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
  • Ask HN: Windows 10-based devs, are you upgrading to Windows 11?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2023
    Apparently, WSLg does away with the need for a separate X server, making things "easy" to use:

    https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

  • Graphics in c++ but in wsl
    2 projects | /r/cpp | 28 Apr 2023
    There's two completely different aspects to your question. 1) How to manage libraries in c++ without dying from cringe? I'd suggest you use cmake as the build system and grab library sources directly from GitHub using this tool: https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake 2) How to get apps that run under WSL to display windows-native windows? I'm not sure, but it's probably this: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
  • How Can I Scale GUI Applications on WSL2.
    2 projects | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 24 Apr 2023
  • Your php dev workflow on Windows while using Docker
    3 projects | /r/PHP | 15 Feb 2023
    Install WSL2, install docker there and phpstorm, use x410 or any xserver or microsoft one https://github.com/microsoft/wslg.
  • Free from the Apple jail
    2 projects | /r/thinkpad | 11 Jan 2023
    It actually works with native apps. It has also opengl acceleration normally: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
  • Updated Install Instructions Dec 2022
    3 projects | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 1 Dec 2022
    If you're new to WSL as I am, you'll marvel at graphical apps "just working", appearing as normal windows getting along like any other app. Under the hood, this isn't entirely unlike running a VM in "seamless mode". There are a few paths WSLG can take to make this happen, some better than other. If you have a linux GUI app running and open the windows "Task view" (by pressing Windows + Tab or whatever), if you see a "WARN: COPY MODE" label atop your linux apps, WSLG is being forced to use a slow path to render areas to screen. The exact reasons why escape me. An older ticket recommended installing an updated Mesa package to get to Mesa 21.x, but new WSL 2 installs are already there. Nonetheless, I followed those steps, ended up with Mesa 22.2.4, restarted WSL and the warning went away, replaced by a much higher refresh rate for linux windows (easy to check if you just drag a linux window around.) Notably, the warning came back once later, with scary logs in /mnt/wslg/weston.log about shared_memory errors, but restarting Windows made things better again.. YMMV.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing i3 and wslg you can also consider the following projects:

sway - i3-compatible Wayland compositor

GWSL-Source - The actual code for GWSL. And some prebuilt releases.

awesome - awesome window manager

WSL2-Linux-Kernel - The source for the Linux kernel used in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2)

bspwm - A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

WSL - Issues found on WSL

xmonad - The core of xmonad, a small but functional ICCCM-compliant tiling window manager

tmux - tmux source code

dwm - LEV Linux's window manager (a fork of dwm)

exwm - Emacs X Window Manager

cmder - Lovely console emulator package for Windows