I told myself I wasn’t gonna do it anytime soon but I distro hopped from Endeavour OS to Arch with Hyprland in the span of 3 days. Nothing against endeavour. I just tried to customize, broke some stuff and decided to try Hyprland again. I’m quite liking it. It takes awhile to get used to it but it’s fun. I cloned a repo for a customized version of it. I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it but wish me luck!
From what I can tell it’s a compositing window manager for wayland (the potential successor to X11, in case you didn’t know). It does make things very neat and pretty though.
To add to this: Wayland is a bit different than X11. In X11 you had split responsibilities: Compositing, X Server and Window Manager. Wayland only refers to the protocol and compositors implement that protocol. So Hyprland is a compositor which implements the wayland protocol. The compositor has a lot more responsibilities in wayland since it needs to do everything itself which in X11 was split across different applications.
Here’s a neat site for the wayland protocol: https://wayland.app/protocols/
So what’s the difference between a compositor, a window manager and a desktop environment? I’m still a bit confused about the whole thing.
Desktop environment is like traditional windows desktop, everything included. It has stuff like notification daemons, advanced settings, toolbars, task manager and so on.
Window manager let’s you manage windows but often doesn’t have it’s own toolbar, notification demon, task manager and other things. People who run window managers are picking their own toolbar software, their own notification daemon and so on. They want a much more customizable personal experience, often heavily themed as well. Usually a window manager is also faster than a desktop environment since it does less things.
Compositor is what gives drop shadows, transparency and other visual effects. Its often built into desktop environments but is often missing from window managers, but not always. When it’s missing, people install one of their own. There are a few popular choices.
Examples of desktop environments: Gnome, KDE Example of window managers: Sway, Hyprland, i3, xfce, awesome wm
Thank you.