For ages, my desktop was just... there. A functional grid of icons and windows. I'd used GNOME, dabbled in KDE, but I never really loved my desktop environment. It was a utility, not a space I enjoyed being in.
Then I saw a video of Hyprland.
The wobbly windows, the smooth-as-butter workspace transitions, the "magic lamp" effect when closing an app. Even their website is gorgeous! It was pure visual theatre. As someone who spends most of their day staring at a terminal and a code editor, I thought, "I want that."
So, I backed up my dotfiles, took a deep breath, and dove in.
The Good: It's More Than Just Pretty
Getting Hyprland installed on Arch was surprisingly straightforward. The real work is building your desktop around it. Hyprland is a compositor - the foundation - but you bring your own bricks. You choose your own status bar (waybar
), app launcher (wofi
), notification daemon, and everything else.
This "some assembly required" approach is daunting at first, but it's also incredibly empowering. Your desktop becomes truly yours.
And those animations? They're not just a gimmick. They provide visual feedback that makes the entire experience feel more intuitive and responsive. But the real magic isn't the eye candy; it's the workflow it enables.
As a tiling window manager, Hyprland forces you into a keyboard-first way of life. Launching apps, switching windows, moving them between monitors - it all happens with keybinds. After a couple of days, using a mouse to drag windows around felt archaic and slow. My hands barely leave the keyboard, and the efficiency gain is massive.
All of this is controlled by a single, beautiful text file: hyprland.conf
. Want to change an animation curve? Tweak a keybind? Adjust the gap between windows? It's all right there. For anyone who loves to tinker and version control their setup, it's a dream come true. I have recently started moving some of my config into additional files and including them into my main hyprland.conf
just because it's a little cleaner.
The Not-So-Good: The Rabbit Hole is Deep
My first week with Hyprland was less about doing my GCSE revision and more about tweaking my hyprland.conf
. The sheer number of options is a double-edged sword. It's amazing to have that level of control, but it's also a massive time sink. You can easily lose an entire afternoon perfecting the exact speed of your workspace transition.
There's also the Wayland factor. While the experience is incredibly smooth, some things can still be a bit tricky. Screen sharing, for example, relies on PipeWire and XDG portals. It works well now, but it took me a bit of research to get it set up correctly for Discord and Slack. It's not the "it just works" experience you might get from a more traditional desktop environment.
Is Hyprland for everyone? No. If you want a simple, out-of-the-box experience where you don't have to think about configuration files, you're probably better off with GNOME or KDE.
Hyprland is my favourite piece of software on my laptop and I haven't even considered switching back after over a year of using it.