So I’ve been using Linux for about a year and a half, have been using Window managers since a few wweks in, have been using Wayland for the last 3 months or so, and have been using Hyprland for about a month. I love it and I want to stick with it in the long term, but I need a distro that supports it.
My essential needs are:
Hyprland NWG-Look (for gtk themes) CMUS Thunar Ristretto bemenu j4-dmenu-desktop (can build from source) Vivaldi (can use deb/rpm/extra repo)
My main issue stems from the fact that:
I want Stability. As such, Arch (and derivatives) are out of the question.
I don’t like immutability. As such, NixOS is out of the question.
I’m concerned about the future of Fedora. It’s where I’m at right now, yet the telemetry proposal, if accepted, would mean I need to switch.
If you have any other distros that fit my criteria, please leave them below. I know void can take care of all of these, except Hyprland itself and while River is available (and River is amazing) I would prefer to run Hyprland instead.
Arch, NixOS and openSUSE Tumbleweed are very supported.
Source: https://wiki.hyprland.org/Getting-Started/Installation/
I would recommend an Arch based distro if you want to keep it simple. That will give you access to the AUR and compatibility with the arch wiki.
PS: Arch can be very stable, especially if you use an LTS kernel and don’t restart during updates.
I’m considering Tumbleweed. I think it might work.
At risk of sounding like an Arch shill, I’ve had the best experience with Hyprland on Arch. I first tried to get it working on Garuda but couldn’t get it to work without weird issues, then found it wasn’t available on Linux Mint (might be available now? Not sure). Worked pretty much out of the box on Arch with Sddm, and havent run into issues since.
That being said I tend to not install many packages, which reduces the chance of things breaking, so your miles may vary.
I think Hyprland might be available on Pop!_OS, might be worth checking that out.
At risk of sounding like an Arch shill, I’ve had the best experience with Hyprland on Arch. I first tried to get it working on Garuda but couldn’t get it to work without weird issues, then found it wasn’t available on Linux Mint (might be available now? Not sure). Worked pretty much out of the box on Arch with Sddm, and havent run into issues since.
That being said I tend to not install many packages, which reduces the chance of things breaking, so your miles may vary.
I think Hyprland might be available on Pop!_OS, might be worth checking that out.
Debian
Debian doesn’t have these packages. Otherwise, I would just hop to it.
Compile it =D
You could also use Nix or those things that let you install AUR packages in Debian.
Unfortunately, Hyprland is built on a tagged version of wlroots, and because it will likely need to pull in newer packages than Debian, I could end up in compilation hell. And I would prefer to avoid using nix for window managers/Wayland compositors if I can avoid it.
I mean if you want stability, Debian 12
Stability with a compositor in it’s beta stages not a good combo. You want the latest packages that fix bugs and add features in this case.
It doesn’t have the packages I need.
Use Nix?
I’m considering it, even though I’d prefer to avoid using Nix for things like that.
I suggest replacing j4-dmenu-desktop with tofi
Can I make Tofi look exactly like dmenu (with some minor colour tweaks)? And does it have a drun mode for desktop files? If so, I’m switching to it.
Yes and yes.
Horizontal mode and tofi-drun are what you’re looking for.
make sure to specify a path to font in the config file, it’ll make it load significantly faster.
Arch, what do you mean with “stability”?
That the installation is stable, as opposed to constantly changing, as is the case (by design) with rolling release distros (e.g. Arch). Package version updates are conservative to prevent surprises.
Hyprland is still a young project, it is also a wayland compositor, I think the rolling release model is benefitial in these cases
Mainly that there aren’t that many broken packages (which seems to happen more often now, than it used to, with Arch)
As an Arch user for 3 years, I can corroborate this. Steam recently broke because a shared library updated, so I had to downgrade it. There was that whole pipewire nonsense before that. It only happens every few months, but it’s annoying when it does. And some packages aren’t as up-to-date as I would like, so OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora are looking like attractive options to me in the near future.
Yeah, I agree with all you said. I’m on Arch currently, and I’ve forgotten how simple the post-install setup is (as long as you know what you’re doing). Funny, it was also my first time installing Arch the Arch Way, even though most of my year and a half on Linux has been on Arch and derivatives.
Can someone give me a tl;dr about hyprland? Is there any noticeable difference(s) compared to wayland? Thanks.
Hyprland is a Wayland compositor. Wayland is the set of protocols, Wlroots is an implementation of these protocols, allowing developers to create a Wayland compositor without having to worry about all the lower-level stuff, while still having to implement a lot on their own. Hyprland is a tiling Wayland compositor, the Wayland equivalent of a tiling window, and it includes features like animations and rounded corners (basically eyecandy). Brodie Robertson had a very good explanation on his channel, but I can’t seem to be able to find it.
Alright, that’ll do it. Thanks.
You’re welcome
are there any reasons to prefer hyprland over sway, that are not bells and whistles?
One word: tiling. And no, the autotiling script just doesn’t cut it. If I’m clicking something on Vivaldi on the left hand side, and I have a terminal on the right, but I also need thunar, my file manager, I would like it to open at the bottom of the stack, under the terminal, not under Vivaldi, where my mouse and focus are.
i know what you are talking about. that’s dynamic vs static tiling for you. dwm does it in a similar way
Yeah, but there’s different types of dynamic tiling. Personally, I want it to be like DWM’s attachbottom patch, where a new window appears at the bottom of the stack, jnstead lf the default in DWM and AwesomeWM, where a new window becomes a master window.
Sway… Just behaves weird at times. The tiling just never feels right and it never seems to do exactly what I want. Hyprland just feels better in its behavior. And it has cool animations!
Have you tried Debian based distros? I would try Debian since it’s not a rolling release like the others you mentioned.
They don’t have the packages I need and I don’t want to build everything from source.
