I recently moved my primary desktop computer to Ubuntu 19.10 running Sway without xwayland. It’s a limited experience at this point, because a lot of apps still require X11 support (VS Code, Chromium, etc.). I’m hoping to get a custom build of Chromium and Electron with ozone wayland, but in the meantime, Firefox works and actually everything else I can run in a terminal window. GNOME apps also work. Other than a few minor issues with Firefox (cursor hand icon appearing when hovering over links), everything is nice and smooth.
Since you can spend a lifetime customizing everything to your liking, I thought I’d write out how I set up my email. The unix way is to use a lot of small, purpose-built programs and stitch things together, and I’ve found that to be the best way for me to handle email. I look forward to having better integration with the git send email workflow.
For reading email, I’m currently trying out aerc. It runs in the terminal. I set it to use emacs as the editor as I’m not a fan of vi. My config isn’t really that interesting so far–I’ve just changed some bindings and set address completion to grep an address book file. So far aerc has been a little buggy, and was slow when reading directly from IMAP, so I setup offlineimap to download emails locally in Maildir format. This seems like the right thing to do: have a bunch of apps that work together using file abstractions (treating email as files). Maybe I’ll eventually set up Notmuch to go through my email. About 15 years ago I used Gnus for email (and before that, mutt), but this time I wanted to try something more UNIXy and less Emacs Lisp OS.
My offlineimap config is pretty straightforward. When you run offlineimap, it sort of behaves like an rsync over IMAP. But it doesn’t really do the daemon thing, or at least it recommends that you set that up with systemd. The systemd config is basically taken straight from the offlineimap docs which I found by running dpkg -L offlineimap. It makes sure I have each account running a sync every 5 minutes. I read some reviews that isync/mbsync is faster than offlineimap, but that hasn’t really bothered me yet.
For passwords, I moved to pass from keepass. I didn’t see any keepass clients that would work in Sway, and it’s nifty having one that works in the terminal and uses gnupg under the covers. The offlineimap config has a custom python script that calls gpg to decrypt the email passwords.