January 17, 2025 - Reading time: 4 minutes
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.
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