The difference is what each door asks of the room. A swing door needs clear floor to arc into, while a slider needs none because the panel travels along the opening. Swing doors seal well at the perimeter and open the full width. Sliders suit tubs, tight bathrooms and openings wider than a single panel could ever cover.
A hinged shower door needs its arc kept clear, and in a bathroom with a vanity, a toilet and a door of its own that is not always on offer. Stand in the room and sweep your arm along the path the glass will take. If it clips the vanity, the toilet tank or the bathroom door, a slider solves the problem outright, since a sliding panel never leaves the plane of the opening. Frameless hinged doors can be set to open in either direction, which helps at the margins but does not erase the clearance requirement.
Clearance is about more than the arc. A hinged door also needs somewhere for you to stand while you open it, and in a narrow bathroom that means stepping backward into the vanity or the toilet to make room. Walk the whole motion, not just the sweep of the glass. If you find yourself shuffling sideways in the imaginary version, the real one will irritate you every single morning.
Swing doors close against a jamb and a strike, and with the right sweep and seals they hold water well even over a curb. They do drip into the room when you open them, which is why the door should open away from a wood vanity and toward the shower floor wherever the layout allows. Sliders keep water inside the track path, but the track is the thing to watch. It collects film, and a blocked weep hole is the most common reason water finds the bathroom floor.
Hinges and rollers wear in different ways. Frameless hinges hold tension and alignment, and when a door starts to drop or stops closing square they are usually adjustable. Rollers ride a track that fills with soap and minerals, and they keep running smoothly as long as that track gets wiped and stays clear. Neither system is fussy. Both punish a shower that never gets dried.
Swinging doors also carry a width limit that sliders do not. Past a certain panel width the glass gets heavy enough that the hinges and the wall behind them work hard on every close, and the panel starts wanting a header for support. Wide openings are exactly where sliders belong, since two panels divide the same span into pieces the hardware handles comfortably.
It can when the shower is large enough that the arc clears the fixtures inside, and many frameless doors are set up to swing both ways. The catch is water. An inward only door drips onto the shower floor, which is good, but it also traps you behind the glass if anything is in the way. In a small enclosure, outward or bidirectional is the practical setup.
Yes, in a barn style arrangement where a heavy tempered panel hangs from an exposed track and rolls across a fixed panel. The look is clean and the hardware becomes a feature instead of something to hide. It needs blocking set behind the tile to carry that track, and the header has to be set level rather than following a wall that is not.
Door swing is the kind of thing that looks fine on a plan and fails in a real bathroom. The free in-home measure includes that clearance check, and if a slider turns out to be the better answer for your room, we will say so before anything gets cut.
