Technology

Every once in a while, I’ll give Wayland another try. I’ve been using the i3 window manager for years, so my last attempt was another crack at using Sway as my Wayland Composer. I had put weeks of effort into getting Sway working for my general development workflow, but it was eventually frustrating and broken enough that I went back to using i3/X11. This year, I’ve decided to try Hyprland. With its pretty animations and visuals, I heard good things about this tiling window composer. A few months in and there are still some Wayland things that frustrate me, but Hyprland is far beyond my Sway experience. I’ve had to, once again, try to reconstruct my workflows and default applications, but overall I’ve made a lot more headway this time. Hyprland is usable enough that I want to try to continue using it for the foreseeable future.

Make Development Fun Again

The first version of Hyprland I tried opened with a background image of the project’s anime mascot. I loved the default colors and cute initial wallpaper, but the anime theme upset several users¹ and was removed last year². When I attempted to find a Void Linux package for Hyprland, I found a discussion complaining about how the developers were “pricks” and accused someone of having a “smooth brain” because they liked Rust³. These little snippets made me laugh, and I got the impression this was likely a fun open source project and a labor of love, vastly different from the cold and enterprise world open source software development has become. I’m glad I took the dive and gave Hyprland a try. Sadly, the project hasn’t been able to avoid attention from political actors. For now, I’ll focus on my experience, and cover more of the politics later on.

The Gotchas

I spent a lot of time on my Hyprland and Waybar configurations. I was happy to discover Conky now supports Wayland, and I used both Conky and Waybar for a pretty useful desktop. However, I ran into a couple of things I needed to work around to get the applications I use to work in Wayland, scale correctly and have access to other essential parts of my system via dbus.

Unlocking Keystores

When using Sway, a lot of the default keyrings used by most Linux apps would not unlock. On i3/X11, I’d get popup dialogs to unlock the gnome-keyring or enter a PGP password. This doesn’t seem to popup on the Wayland tiling composers I’ve tried. Hyprland seemed to have the same problems at first, preventing messaging applications from loading saved credentials. I discovered if I ran seahorse first to unlock my keystores, most applications that depend on gnome-keyring now work fine.

Electron App Wrappers

I created wrappers for Electron apps I use so they utilize Wayland instead of X11. This usually involves adding the flags --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland. Element also has the environment setting XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity. At one point, it wouldn’t load correctly without this, although it doesn’t appear to need it anymore. There was a version of FreeTube that would crash when going fullscreen on Wayland⁴, but it was due to an Electron bug that was fixed⁵. This bug was supposedly fixed in Element as well⁶, yet I still encounter it in Element 1.11.76 when displaying a video fullscreen.

# Electron Wrapper scripts

# ~/bin/freetube-wayland

#!/bin/sh
exec freetube-bin --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

# ~/bin/element-wayland

#!/bin/sh
exec env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity element-desktop --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

Scaling

When I last tried Sway, it had horrific scaling for X11 applications, with no option to let those applications handle scaling on their own. I have the following lines in my hyprland.conf to handle scaling on my monitors and to prevent Hyprland from scaling X11 applications:

monitor=HDMI-A-1,preferred,0x0,1.875
monitor=DP-1,preferred,0x1152,1.875

xwayland {
  force_zero_scaling = true
}

This makes it easy for applications without Wayland support to handle their own scaling. Most tools allow you to zoom using a key combination (typically Ctrl+) or by a configuration setting. Zoom can be set in IntelliJ/PyCharm using the following preference:

Thunderbird

Thunderbird’s reminders didn’t float properly. I added the following rules to get them to display correctly⁷:

windowrulev2 = float,class:^(thunderbird)$,title:^(.*)(Reminder)(.*)$

Replacing Old Tools and Workflows

In the best cases, migrating to Wayland/Hyprland just requires some custom configuration. In less than ideal situations, applications need to be replaced entirely. For the worst cases, an entire workflow may need to be thrown out. I experienced all of these possibilities when dealing with tasks as basic as taking screenshots and as advanced as clipboard management.

Screenshots

I still cannot get Flameshot to work on Hyprland. The tools grim, slurp and swappy can be combined to capture a part of the screen. A delay can be inserted using sleep and placed in a script like the following:

#!/bin/sh
sleep 2; grim -g "$(slurp)" - | swappy -f -

However, you cannot use this to capture most popup or context menus. For that, you need to capture the active window using a script such as the following:

#!/bin/sh
sleep 2; grim -g (hyprctl -j activewindow | jq -r '"\(.at[0]),\(.at[1]) \(.size[0])x\(.size[1])"') - | swappy -f -

swappy is a nice tool. I’m thankful it exists. However, it can only save images into a default location. If you want to save images to a specific location, you need to prompt for the filename first using a tool like zenity⁸. It also cannot crop images. Although there are workarounds for cropping⁹, I found it easier to just capture the active window and open the result in Gimp.

Screenshots are still an area where Hyprland (and Wayland composer in general) still suffer. Although, I’ve gotten by for several months using a combination of grim, slurp and swappy, it’s still a hacky and frustrating solution; a far cry from what comes out-of-the-box with Flameshot.

Supervisord

When using my KVM switch to jump between machines, switching back to Hyprland would often result in applications crashing. Usually it was just my status bar or wallpaper changer. Restarting all of them became tedious, so I configured Hyprland to launch supervisord as my process manager. The following is an example configuration file I placed in ~/.config/hypr/supervisord.conf. It has a process group called monitors, allowing me to easily restart applications that commonly crash on monitor disconnects.

[supervisord]
logfile = /tmp/hypr-services/supervisor.log
pidfile = /tmp/hypr-services/supervisor.pid
childlogdir = /tmp/hypr-services/log/

[unix_http_server]
file=/tmp/hypr-services/supervisord.sock

[supervisorctl]
serverurl = unix:///tmp/hypr-services/supervisord.sock
username = supervisor
password = <insert a secret password>

[rpcinterface:supervisor]
supervisor.rpcinterface_factory = supervisor.rpcinterface:make_main_rpcinterface

[group:monitors]
programs=wallpaper,conky,waybar

[program:wallpaper]
command = /home/(username)/.cargo/bin/wpaperd

[program:conky]
command = /usr/bin/conky

[program:rgb]
command = /usr/bin/openrgb --startminimized

[program:waybar]
command = /usr/bin/waybar

[program:clipboard]
command = wl-paste --watch cliphist store

[program:notifications]
command = /usr/lib64/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd

[program:idle]
command = /usr/bin/hypridle

I’ve added the following to ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf to ensure supervisord is launched one at startup.

exec-once = mkdir -p /tmp/hypr-services/log/ && /usr/bin/supervisord -c /home/(username)/.config/hypr/supervisord.conf

I then add the following alias to my shell, so that I can easily run supervisord commands with the alias hctl:

alias hctl 'supervisorctl -c ~/.config/hypr/supervisord.conf'

Status Bars

On i3, I was using i3status for my workspace bar. I had to create a new configuration to get something equivalent using waybar.

The following is my configuration. I use the tool wttrbar to pull Weather information.

{
  "layer": "top",
  "position": "bottom",

  "modules-left": [
    "hyprland/workspaces",
    "custom/right-arrow-dark",
    "hyprland/window",
  ],
  "modules-center": [
    "custom/left-arrow-dark",
    "custom/weather",
    "custom/left-arrow-light",
    "custom/left-arrow-dark",
    "clock#1",
    "clock#2",
    "clock#3",
    "clock#4",
    "clock#5",
    "custom/right-arrow-dark"
  ],
  "modules-right": [
    "cava",
    "custom/left-arrow-dark",
      "network#speed",
      "custom/left-arrow-light",
    "custom/left-arrow-dark",
      "network#4",
      "network#6",
    "custom/left-arrow-light",
    "custom/left-arrow-dark",
    "tray"
  ],
    "custom/weather": {
        "format": "{}",
        "tooltip": true,
        "interval": 3600,
        "exec": "/home/(username)/.cargo/bin/wttrbar --location Chattanooga",
        "return-type": "json"
    },
  "custom/left-arrow-dark": {
    "format": "",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "custom/left-arrow-light": {
    "format": "",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "custom/right-arrow-dark": {
    "format": "",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "custom/right-arrow-light": {
    "format": "",
    "tooltip": false
  },
    "cava": {
        "framerate": 30,
        "autosens": 1,
        "bars": 10,
        "lower_cutoff_freq": 50,
        "higher_cutoff_freq": 10000,
        "method": "pulse",
        "source": "auto",
        "stereo": false,
        "reverse": false,
        "bar_delimiter": 0,
        "monstercat": false,
        "waves": true,
        "noise_reduction": 0.77,
        "input_delay": 2,
        "format-icons" : ["▁", "▂", "▃", "▄", "▅", "▆", "▇", "█" ],
        "actions": {
            "on-click-right": "mode"
        }
    },
  "hyprland/workspaces": {
    "format": "{name}",
    "on-scroll-up": "hyprctl dispatch workspace e-1",
    "on-scroll-down": "hyprctl dispatch workspace e+1"
  },
  "hyprland/window": {
        "format": "👉 {}",
        "rewrite": {
            "(.*) — Mozilla Firefox": "🌎 $1",
            "(.*) - fish": "> [$1]"
        },
        "separate-outputs": true
    },
  "clock#1": {
    "format": " Seattle: {:%H:%M} ",
    "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "clock#2": {
    "format": " Chicago: {:%H:%M} ",
    "timezone": "America/Chicago",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "clock#3": {
    "format": " New York: {:%H:%M} ",
    "timezone": "America/New_York",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "clock#4": {
    "format": " London: {:%H:%M} ",
    "timezone": "Europe/London",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "clock#5": {
    "format": " Auckland: {:%H:%M} ",
    "timezone": "Pacific/Auckland",
    "tooltip": false
  },
  "network#speed" : {
      "format": " {bandwidthUpBytes} / {bandwidthDownBytes} ",
      "interface": "enp1s0f1",
      "interval": 1
  },
  "network#4" : {
      "format": " {ipaddr} ",
      "interface": "enp1s0f1",
      "interval": 1,
      "family": "ipv4",
  },
  "network#6" : {
      "format": " {ipaddr} ",
      "interface": "enp1s0f1",
      "family": "ipv6",
  },
  "tray": {
    "icon-size": 15,
    "show-passive-items": true,
  }
}

In the above example, I’ve included the cava widget, even though it’s not supported in the version of waybar available in Gentoo. Currently, there is only a package for media-sound/cava, and not for building a shared library. I have a local Gentoo Portage overlay located in /usr/local/portage, and created media-sound/libcava, based off of the media-sound/cava ebuild, with the following:

EAPI=8

inherit meson

DESCRIPTION="Console-based Audio Visualizer for Alsa"
HOMEPAGE="https://github.com/karlstav/cava/"
SRC_URI="
    https://github.com/LukashonakV/cava/archive/refs/tags/${PV}.tar.gz
        -> ${P}.tar.gz
"

LICENSE="MIT Unlicense"
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="amd64 x86"
IUSE="alsa jack +ncurses pipewire portaudio pulseaudio sdl sndio"

RDEPEND="
    dev-libs/iniparser:4
    sci-libs/fftw:3.0=
    alsa? ( media-libs/alsa-lib )
    jack? ( virtual/jack )
    ncurses? ( sys-libs/ncurses:= )
    pipewire? ( media-video/pipewire:= )
    portaudio? ( media-libs/portaudio )
    pulseaudio? ( media-libs/libpulse )
    sdl? (
        media-libs/libglvnd
        media-libs/libsdl2[opengl,video]
    )
    sndio? ( media-sound/sndio:= )
"
DEPEND="${RDEPEND}"
BDEPEND="
    virtual/pkgconfig
    sdl? ( dev-build/autoconf-archive )
"
S="${WORKDIR}/cava-${PV}"

PATCHES=(
    "${FILESDIR}"/${PN}-0.8.0-gentoo-iniparser4.patch
)

src_prepare() {
    default
    echo ${PV} > version || die
}

src_configure() {
    local emesonargs=(
    )
    meson_src_configure
}

I then copied the ebuild for gui-apps/waybar to my local overlay, and modified it so -Dcava=disabled was now -Dcava=enabled

# diff /usr/portage/gui-apps/waybar/waybar-0.10.3.ebuild /usr/local/portage/gui-apps/waybar/waybar-0.10.3.ebuild
80c80
<     -Dcava=disabled
---
>     -Dcava=enabled

Finally, I used the following as my waybar stylesheet, located in ~/.config/waybar/style.css.

@define-color main-background #003566;
@define-color second-background #001d3d;

@define-color main-text #ade8f4;
@define-color second-text #bde0fe;
@define-color alert-color #c1121f;

@define-color highlight #ffd60a;

* {
    font-size: 12px;
    font-family: monospace;
    min-height: 0;
}

window#waybar {
    background: @second-background;
    color: @main-text;
}

#custom-right-arrow-dark,
#custom-left-arrow-dark {
    color: @main-background;
}
#custom-right-arrow-light,
#custom-left-arrow-light {
    color: @second-background;
    background: @main-background;
}

#workspaces,
#clock.1,
#clock.2,
#clock.3,
#clock.4,
#clock.5,
#network.4,
#network.6,
#network.speed,
#custom-weather,
#cava,
#tray {
    background: @main-background;
}

#tray, #window {
    padding-left: 10px;
}

#network.speed {
    min-width: 180px;
    color: @second-text;
}

#network.4, #network.6 {
    color: @second-text;
}

#custom-weather {
  padding: 0 5px;
}

#workspaces button {
    padding: 0 2px;
    color: #fdf6e3;
}
#workspaces button.active {
    color: @highlight;
    border-bottom: 2px solid @highlight;
}
#workspace button.urgent {
    color: @alert-color;
}
#workspaces button:hover {
    box-shadow: inherit;
    text-shadow: inherit;
}
#workspaces button:hover {
    background: @main-background;
    border: #1a1a1a;
    padding: 0 3px;
}
#cava {
    background: @second-background;
    padding-right: 10px;
}

The only minor issues I seem to have with this configuration is the style for #workspace button.urgent. With the i3 window manager, a workspace name on the status bar would turn red, indicating a notification. These would trigger when chat programs received messages, or a link was opened in a web browser. I’m not sure if or how similar notifications are implemented in Wayland. Even though I’m using Wayland versions of web browsers and chat applications, Waybar doesn’t appear to be showing notifications. Either my CSS configuration is incorrect or the events haven’t been implemented between these programs and Wayland/Hyprland.

Clipboard Management

On i3, I had been using parcellite for clipboard management. In the supervisord configuration listed previously, I had a section to launch wl-paste --watch cliphist store as a background daemon. Cliphist is a clipboard history manager for Wayland. The following line in my ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf attaches a keybinding to bring up my clipboard history in a wofi menu selector:

bind = Ctrl_Alt, H, exec, cliphist list | wofi --sort-order=default --show dmenu  | cliphist decode | wl-copy

Transparent Inactive Windows

With i3, I used compton to make inactive windows transparent, using the following configuration:

# compton.conf
mark-ovredir-focused = true;
inactive-opacity = 0.8;
menu-opacity = 0.9;

To get a similar effect with Hyprland, the following rule can be added to hyprland.conf¹⁰:

windowrulev2 = opacity 1.0 0.8,class:.*

Wofi

On i3, I had been using rofi as my launcher and menu selection tool. Although I can create rules for rofi to float and center correctly, I had issues with it not correctly getting focus and having blurry text. I switched to wofi, and equivalent program for Wayland. Wofi does look better, and the text is considerably more crisp. However, it is sometimes slower than rofi when loading menus.

I use splatmoji as my emoji picker, and it can be configured for wofi using the following splatmoji.config

rofi_command=wofi -dmenu -p '' -i -monitor -2
xsel_command=wl-copy
xdotool_command=xdotool sleep 0.2 type --delay 100

I used a script called quickswitch.py to search and switch to a window using its title. I found the following script that achieves the same thing in Hyprland using wofi and just a few lines¹¹.

#!/bin/bash
WINDOW=$(hyprctl clients | grep "class: " | awk '{gsub("class: ", "");print}' | wofi --show dmenu)
if [ "$WINDOW" = "" ]; then
    exit
fi
hyprctl dispatch focuswindow $WINDOW

Scratchpad

I use QOwnNotes as my note-taking program. On i3, I was able to place this program on a scratchpad workspace that I could activate with a hotkey. Hyprland also supports a scratchpad workspace, but by default it takes up the entire screen. I found the following settings to customize my scratchpad in Hyprland. However, it doesn’t seem like it’s possible to focus on, or interact with, any window that’s behind the scratchpad¹².

dwindle {
  special_scale_factor=0.60
}
bind = $mainMod, S, togglespecialworkspace, magic
bind = $mainMod SHIFT, S, movetoworkspacesilent, special:magic

Issues

• If I configure my monitors to go into standby using DPMS, one of my monitors will power down while the other will blank for a few seconds before turning back on. This is a known issue. It has some workarounds (none of which I could get to work), and no solutions¹³.
• Monitor disconnects and reconnects can result in some windows not being scaled correctly, causing them to appear blurry¹⁴. I’ve found moving a window to another monitor and back will correct the scaling, but this can be tedious and there don’t appear to be any workarounds yet.
• Drag and drop between file managers like Dolphin and various programs (both X11 and Wayland) seems to be inconsistent and unreliable.
• Clicking on a link will sometimes open that link in an active web browser, and sometimes I’ll get an error saying a browser is already open.

Support

Hyprland does have an official website with excellent documentation. Unfortunately, it does not have a public web forum. Instead, they rely on Discord and Matrix for chat. I’ve been frustrated by other projects that use Discord for support, because it’s closed source¹⁵ and makes searching for known solutions much more difficult¹⁶.

The Matrix chat isn’t very active, but there are helpful people on it that do occasionally read and respond to messages. Although the Discord chat seems more active, it requires phone number verification to participate, which is an instant dealbreaker for me.

The Political Landscape of Open Source Projects

Most projects need a starting point, and it’s difficult to create a new Wayland composer from scratch. Hyprland used a library called wl-roots. The original creator of wl-roots has accused Hyprland of being “developed entirely in the high school boy’s locker room” and being “bigoted, hateful, and obnoxious¹⁷.” Hyprland’s issue tracker has been used to accuse developers of thought-crimes by posting screenshots of their Discord chat¹⁸, where they mostly joked about exclusive inclusivity.

The creator of wl-roots wrote an article about how Hyprland was a toxic community¹⁹. Vaxry, the creator of Hyprland, wrote a very detailed response addressing all allegations made against the Hyprland community²⁰. Eventually, Vaxry wrote his own Code of Conduct and added it to the Hyprland codebase²¹.

I don’t want to go into all the muddy details and accusations, as it’s quite exhausting. Hyprland fulfilled a need that was deeply missing in the world of tiling window composers for Wayland. The moment it got successful, it was attacked by people from entirely different projects, who didn’t like the political views or chat messages from other Hyprland contributors. Accusations of hatefulness have become a political tool used by activists to control, manipulate and destroy open source software projects²².

So far, Hyprland seems to have weathered the storm and grown in popularity. It has successfully removed all dependencies on wl-roots in the 0.42.0 release²³. However, the latest version still seems to have many of the issues I’ve mentioned here, leading me to believe they might be inherent to writing Wayland composers in general and not wl-roots.

Still, I hope the best for the project and that it continues to improve. It will be another test to see if open source projects can truly weather the coming political and ideological storms.

Summaries

As a quick recap, here is a list of applications I had to migrate from, and what I replaced them with, when going from i3 to Hyprland.

• Clipboard Manager - parcellite replaced with a combination of cliphist, wofi, wl-copy, wl-paste and specific keybindings
• Quick Launch Menus - rofi replaced with wofi for quick menus used to launch programs, search through running windows and select emojis
• Screenshots - Flameshot replaced by stitching together grim, slurp, and swappy
• Status Bars - Waybar replaced i3status, while Conky was updated to use Wayland
• Transparent Windows - What was previously provided by compton can be configured directly within Hyprland
• Wallpapers - Wpaperd replaced custom wallpaper scripts

The follow is a recap of things that are still broken or not great.

• Librewolf, Waybar, Conky and Wpaperd might crash on monitor disconnects - If you disconnect a monitor (or use a KVM switch), these four programs sometimes crash. Other times they don’t. Librewolf and Conky did not have any crashing issues under i3 when used with my KVM switch.
• Hyprland cannot gracefully handle monitor disconnects - The window manager moves everything off of a disconnected monitor to a connected one. Just like Sway, there’s no way to configure it to gracefully ignore disconnected monitors.
• dpms is broken on one monitor - A known issue that is probably more the fault of my monitor than Hyprland, but still one that affects a lot of people
• grim+swappy are still inferior to Flameshot - They work for many of my use cases. So I can continue to work around and improve my workflow for screenshots.
• No workspace level notification - Although there are CSS codes and APIs for workspace notifications in Wayland, they don’t appear to be implemented in any of the applications I use, or Waybar doesn’t display them correctly.
• Blurry Windows - When disconnecting a monitor or coming out of DPMS, some windows will not be scaled correctly and will appear blurry.

Conclusions

There are still some minor issues here and there with Hyprland. Small things like graphical glitches or momentary smearing during animations and transitions don’t bother me that much. The window manager is surprisingly mature and functional compared to Sway. The biggest functional issue I have is with monitor disconnects and my KVM switch, which are incredibly annoying. Still, I’ve been using Hyprland/Wayland for several months now, and this is the first time I haven’t immediately felt like calling it quits and going back to X11.

Although I have been using Hyprland full-time for months, the issues I’ve stated have really started to annoy me during day-to-day use. My work laptop is still on i3, and I’d be very hesitant to try Hyprland on that device, considering potential issues with video calls and screen sharing.

I recently started using wezterm on my work laptop. Although it claims to have Wayland support, it fails to launch in Hyprland. I did a few cursory searchers to diagnose the issue, but didn’t find anything that worked. This was yet another example of how I couldn’t even try a terminal without running into issues on a Wayland composer. Despite all the advances and amazing work Hyprland has made, Wayland composers are still a frustrating mess that require massive changes to workflows, and replacing so much existing tooling, that I hesitate to see any worthwhile benefit for my use cases.

For the time being, my primary machine will likely be going back to i3 and X11. I will keep experimenting with Hyprland on my laptop and secondary devices. I hope for the day when Hyprland is mature enough to be a trouble free daily driver. Until that day comes, I hope the developers of Hyprland can keep themselves safe from the toxic elements arising within the Open Source Community that seek to use politics to undermine rising projects.