I have made it pretty clear I am not a big fan of windows, i switched to linux only a few years ago and will never go back to that hell hole.

So i started my journey on xfce, it's a lightweight DE and one of the few i knew somewhat about when i started using linux more. When i started my journey i mainly knew gnome, kde and some about xfce. I had used gnome and wasn't a big fan. I also didn't want something that is too much like windows, xfce was light weight and fit my needs so that's what i went with. I enjoyed this for a long time.

So why did i switch if i was so happy with xfce? I simply wanted something with wayland, at the point i knew about wayland and had decided i wanted to move to something with wayland i had already tried many DEs. I didn't like any of them as they either didn't have wayland or i felt they were too bloated etc.

I knew what I wanted and was fine putting in some work, I saw some posts about hyprland and decided i wanted to try this. After a few days i was hooked and still am. So now that we have a little context let's get into it.

What is hyprland?

Hyprland is a tilting compositor that you can customize down to the smallest details.

Hyprland alone is just going to be a wallpaper if you start like i did, going straight into it...

So I read the docs, read more docs and read guides.

So after gathering some knowledge I went back to it. I decided to get kitty as it was recommended by hyprland. So this time we had a terminal in hyprland, with this i changed some simple keybinds just to get started. Now I was able to launch my browser so read docs while using vim to set up my hyprland.

Some software i went with was waybar and rofi wayland fork. Waybar it gong to be a bar you customize yourself and rofi was just the launcher I thought looked the best (Obviously opinion based). So now i could use my desktop in hyprland and it was fine.

But wouldn't it be nice to see notifications? I went with swaync for this as again i just liked how it looked and was simple enough to add to waybar to see all my notifications.

After a while I wanted to use a bluetooth speaker, but wait there is no nice applet laying up on waybar. I used the gui from blueman as i had it from xfce, but i wanted some gui and also wanted to make this as minimal as possible. I went searching around and found a few rofi scripts, well that was nice as i already had that. I also found some for wifi which i didn't need on my desktop with ethernet but why not. I also set up some scripts for shutdowns/reboots/etc. For lockscreen I added hypridle and hyprlock simply because it was made by hypr devs and seemed simple enough to set up.

After a long time with fine tuning lasting to this day I liked my desktop layout and had fun setting it up exactly how I want. I no longer have xfce installed, all applications that can runs wayland. I found alternatives to make my system be wayland only if i couldn't use flags or find any support for wayland. Some things like the steam launcher couldn't run without xwayland but that was fine as i got the games up with gamescope.

As you might be able to tell I had to learn a lot of different programs, but hey knowledge is power right. And since i found it fun to learn linux this was just a good time. I don't think I would recommend hyprland to any of my friends or new comers. I have seen there are some hyprland setups that do all so do everything for you but I never used those myself (Example is hyde).

But yea I just felt sharing a new linux thingy I like. Now go touch some grass

Ditch Windows?

If you're reading this you probably already know windows isn't privacy friendly at all.

Ads are shoved in your face through the installation and even after setting up "your device" you get ads. Let's be honest it's not your device anymore.

If you want to escape the Windows tracking and ads you might have looked at MacOS or Linux. MacOS is one way to go but you still don't have all the power in your hands. I would personally recommend Linux.

My recommended Linux distros are

Read about the distros yourself to see what would be the best for you.