So, I’ve been on Hyprland for quite a while. Basically, since Brodie Robertson’s first video on it. I have to say, Hyprland single-handedly made Wayland usable for me. Not that I’m strictly opposed to using X; I am one of (what I believe to be) the silent majority of Linux users who says use whatever you want to. Don’t use a display server at all; that’d be pretty cool, too.

But I was curious about Wayland, but I didn’t like i3/sway’s tiling layouts, I couldn’t get scratchpads working on River, and I just didn’t jive with dwl (I wasn’t on it for very long, I don’t remember my specific issues with it). At the time, I was using AwesomeWM on Xorg and I had a workflow that Just Werked(TM) for me. When I first used Hyprland, I noticed things were missing, but the website prominently talked about using plugins; so I checked them out. Pyprland provided scratchpads, and split-monitor-workspace (now replaced with hyprsplit) provided the multi-monitor workspace layout I was comfortable with. While I think animations are cool, I prefer my system to be uber-snappy, so I disabled those.

One of the big roadblocks was that I was recording playing my games (I had something of an aspiration to make YouTube reviews of some of them), and I needed to be able to record just one window. On Xorg, this is super simple; you just open OBS and tell it to record whatever window you want. Not so easy on Wayland. I was using a lot of wlroots based compositors (at the time, it was basically either GNOME, KDE, or wlroots), and the wlroots desktop portal was only able to record whole outputs. Not the worst thing, but not what I wanted; but then Vaxry forked it to make the Hyprland desktop portal, and (among other things) now I could capture specific windows. Nice.

I also ran into many smaller issues, like menu windows on REAPER disappearing instantly and not being interactable, but as with everything else, it got fixed quickly (although my fixes are now lost to time, as I cleared out the window rules in my dotfiles repo. When I started using it, development was at a breakneck pace. Very quickly, there was now a package manager (hyprpm) for Hyprland plugins. Popularity kept rising, so people made more plugins (and Vaxry somehow had the time to make some official ones).

However, with the exception of the window capture in the desktop portal, things just didn’t break on me. Well, with one exception: every time there was a breaking update, I had to rebuild the plugins. I think it’s a fair trade off; they are compiled libraries, so with the benefits of that comes the drawback of having to recompile them. It was a bit annoying when it seemed like every time I updated my computer there was a Hyprland update, but as pace has mellowed out to a more normal/reasonable level, I don’t typically have to do that super often.

But, boiling it down, the main things I like about Hyprland are the things I liked about Awesome: it’s fast, and extensible. And, for a Wayland compositor, there is a lot of flash if you want it (although I usually don’t).

Unlike most things software, I don’t really have much I dislike about it. I think it would be cool if there were more layouts, but there already are a lot. Vaxry even started working on a scrolling layout. I don’t like the default workspaces behavior, I prefer the dwm/awesome method of every workspace having its own separate workspaces, but there’s a plugin for that. I don’t like having a bunch of flashy animations delaying whatever it is I’m trying to do, but those are easily disabled.

Overall, I stopped WM/WC hopping when I settled into Hyprland; I’ve been using it for a couple years and I don’t anticipate leaving it soon. I geniunely look forward to Hyprland Premium, because it’s absolutely worth paying for.