For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating.
In this post I will be going through all the tools and scripts I have been creating to configure this amazing Window Manager to my liking.
↫ xd1.dev
Like I mentioned in my MNT Reform review, I’m not a fan of these “build your own desktop environment” window managers and related tools, but there’s no denying they’re quite popular. This article is a good introduction to hyprland, one of the more popular window managers of this genre.
am I missing something or is there no link to the actual hyprland article?
Oops. Fixed!
From the blog post: >”All of this to say, I am going to assume you are using arch.”
This is what I was expecting – this is basically for Arch users only. I wanted to try Hyprland on a Debian based system recently, but after a quick glance at the required dependencies to build it I decided that it’s not for me right now. Some that I have access to are almost certainly going to be the wrong versions, some dependencies also have to be built which may have their own dependencies. Looks like a nice dynamic tiling window manager from the screenshots, I would love to try it as I use a different dynamic tiling window manager daily. But the lack of any recent Debian packages after 2 years in development does not fill me with confidence about the future of the project. Normally after two years of development a project will have enough going for it to package the typical formats, or to make the project more easily build-able.
Yeah, back in the day when I was running Slackware as my main OS, I wouldn’t bat an eye at building dependencies from source and tracking all of it myself for one little utility or application. These days though, if it’s not in the Void repo or on Flathub, I don’t bother.
Also, I’m not on the Wayland bandwagon so this isn’t my cup of tea anyway. I stick with Xfce because it meets all my needs and requires minimal customization to fit my workflow. If I did want something more in line with this kind of DIY minimalism, there’s always i3wm or awesome (and the really cool cwm on OpenBSD), or if I’m feeling overly masochistic, dwm and its “modify the C source files to customize it” paradigm.
I run Hyprland on NixOS. I pull Hyprland (plus a few Cosmic utilities) from unstable, while the rest of my system uses the stable repo.