Yeah, that power metric can fluctuate wildly depending on how smart their display controller is. Throw VRR and / or event driven rendering into the mix and you get most of the benefits of both with the added benefit of limiting rendering bursts.

I’ll keep saying it, this is called a Word Processor. They were cool when they were simple microcontrollers and LCD displays, not so much now.

Sway still primarily counts as a WM + Compositor, but considering it has keymaps, autostart, and libinput config mechanisms embedded in it, I would say it borders a desktop environment.

One hell of a consolation prize

The inhibit_idle specifier is cool, thanks for the pointer. This two liner can be replaced with:

for_window [all] inhibit_idle fullscreen

Please people, these stand alone guides are fine but continual use of the wiki ensures it is kept up to date. These should not act as or be used like a substitute.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console/Keyboard_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg/Keyboard_configuration

The real problem: Define beginner distro

Every user is starting from a different point. There is no such thing as a beginner distro. You can say this distro is good for people who can grasp the idea of a command line or this distro is good for people who have no idea command line interfaces exist, but that doesn’t differentiate between beginner friendly or not.

I’d recommend tmux for that particular use. Screen has a lot of extras that are interesting but don’t really follow the GNU mentality of “do one thing and do it well.”