What's up with the hyprland hype?

@nostupidquestions What's up with the hyprland hype?
Is it lighter than lxde/lxqt/xfce?

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Hyprland needs a real fork and rebrand so that it's not run by fascists.
Vaxry is:
a nazi sympathizer.
openly supporting and giving space to hateful people
- I agree that Vaxyr has a terrible record with community-building and tolerates bullying.
  I don't think it's fair to call him a Nazi sympathizer, based on the linked screenshots. He never said he espouses the ideology, he just said he wouldn't blanket ban Nazis from his server. Obviously that's a bad take, but it's not the same as being a Nazi sympathizer.
  
  ...
  
  Tolerating them is a form of support. They make spaces unsafe for others.
- Why does these groups always use discord
- lol
- ...
  
  The point has not been missed. The project does not deserve any hype.
  
  For some of us, this is very important.

As others have stated, it's a tiling window manager. Many, including me, prefer it to the usual floating window managers that most desktops use.
But I've been using sway since switching to wayland after years with i3. I see lots of hyprland hype, but i'm happy with my sway workflow and don't see anything about hyprland that makes me want to switch or even try it out.

hyprland has useful features for a tiling compositor, like a special container you can toggle that goes in front of your workspace and it's easy to customise and set up.
However, i think wayfire, even though much harder to set up (it needs a proper config and some helper apps or it's just empty and you can't even launch anything), has cooler effects and has a simple tiling plugin.
Also Gnome/mutter with the Forge extension is better than both, because you can optionally use just the mouse to drag windows at the title bar and drop them in a tiling frame of your choice. This is very helpful when your left hand is full of cheeto dust etc.. Gnome also has the extensions Burn My Windows, Focus, Desktop Cube and Dash to Panel which get you cool effects as well. It also has a Tweaks tool and the extension Just Perfection, which give you additional customization options. Gnome is very easy to set up and usable OOTB, even though not fine tuned. Also it is still backwards compatible to X11, in case you need that one app that looks crap in wayland (looking at you, Java)

If you just mean recently, one of the YouTubers with the most subscribers recently released a video about why he switched to Linux, and in it, he says he uses hyprland
May be affecting its popularity

It's a tiling window manager that has been popular in ricing community. Window manager is a subcomponent of a desktop environment (eg. KDE has KWin), so I suppose you can say it is lighter, but it's different from desktop environments, which has window manager alongside many other components.
As the name suggests, all it does is manage windows. You can move them around, resize them, make one take up the whole screen, move them into different workspace, etc. What makes tiling window manager popular is that it's minimal, making it easier to build your own desktop environment, and a perfect fit for keyboard-oriented workflow. I use Hyprland myself, and I can definitely work just fine without using a mouse.
As for why Hyprland is popular as opposed to other window managers, I think it's because
It's relatively new
It got cool animations
Bunch of well known people use it
- @Object new would generally mean less popular right? I'm comparing it to lxqt in the practical lightness department since it seems to be a fancy wm and it might be more usable as a replacement than lxqt/de which is a pain for me to use. Is the keyboard aspect required?
  
  New would genereally mean less popular, yeah, but Hyprland is past that level of new. Frankly, I haven't compared Hyprland to light DEs like LXQt. I don't really see LXQt working as a replacement for Hyprland. With LXQt, when you boot up your computer, you get things like
  Taskbar
  Start menu
  Background with icons you can double click
  With Hyprland alone, you get none of above. You need to install each component by yourself. Additionally, you get a very minimal configuration that is stored in a single file, and you are expected to make it however you want it to behave.
  The keyboard aspect isn't necessary, but you need to install start menus, taskbars, etc yourself, or use someone else's config. Hyprland allows you to set keybinds for a lot of actions including running programs and commands, which is why your workflow ends up being more keyboard oriented.
  Feel free to ask more. I don't have much to do today.

Thank you for asking this. Also wondering. It's just a compositor for wayland right? A compton/picom equivalent?
Seeing so many posts about it, and wondering why.
I use AwesomeWM with Picom, and my idea of what a compositor does is: provide smooth v-synced video playback, and maybe fade a window out gently when I ask it to vanish.
I think compositors are now taking on new animation/interaction roles, where they are getting fancy with screen transitions like scaling/moving/focusing and other than actually managing the windows, are almost becoming Desktop managers themselves.
- It's a tiling window manager, equivalent of AwesomeWM, but more similar to i3wm and swaywm. It does have built in window transparency effects.

I see no reason to migrate from sway.

It's a really slick looking WM, with a lot of customization, that is Wayland focused. It's a really good project with a lot of promise. I think the hype is warranted.

The same thing happened awhile back with i3wm. It’s just the current popular fancy window manager and looks fairly decent out of the box.
As far as lightweight window managers go, it’s pretty middle of the road. Something like DWM or 2BWM will get you a smaller footprint, but come at the cost of needing extra configuration to make them look more modern.

How does it compare to i3?

It's pretty handy for to go use, but on Desktop it is not really my thing

31 comments