Sway on the Furi FLX1

I sent a short screen recording of my Furi FLX1 running Sway to a friend, and the first response was exactly right: "wtf" followed immediately by "thats wild."

My reaction was more "that was easier than expected."

I did a little testing and planning with Sway tucked inside Phosh, but soon enough I had Sway taking over the display directly. My work is built on Barry from Furi Labs' hardware-composer Sway work. Barry did the hard part. I got to have fun on top: theming it, adding a right-edge launcher, and tuning the little phone gestures that make it feel less like a party trick. To be honest, I stole most of that from the sxmo folks.

The result is a tiny tiling Linux machine that happens to fit in my pocket. Open another app and the screen splits instead of turning into a stack of cards. In the clip, Firefox and a terminal share the phone display, which looks ridiculous for about five seconds and then starts to feel weirdly reasonable.

The top bar gives me workspaces, battery, time, and a few useful status bits. The right edge has a swipe-in shortcut strip for apps and actions. Swipe up for the keyboard. Press the hardware button for an app menu. Long-press it for window controls. I played with detecting when the keyboard is needed, but that is deeper water, so I am happy with the gesture for now.

It is still very much an experiment. Most of it is held together with helper scripts. Waybar can get cranky. The portal path is not where I want it yet. I would not hand this to someone and pretend it is polished.

But that is not really the point. The fun part is that the FLX1 can do this at all: a phone-shaped Linux environment where tiling windows, workspaces, a terminal, browser, launcher, and gesture keyboard all show up in the same small rectangle and mostly behave.

It is silly. It is useful. It made me laugh. That is a good combination.