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Hyprland Premium

account.hypr.land

69 pointsDaSHacka75 comments

I've been using hyprland for about 6 months now, it's undeniably performant, buttery-smooth even but there are still a lot of paper cuts there - I have a feeling this will piss quite a few people off given the temperament in the Linux community for subscription-based software; also feel like it's not really the smartest thing to do if good alternatives already exist for what you're building (sway is not far off in quality)

Had to chuckle at the idea of hyprland support because the few times I had issues prior to this (with getting a nonstandard setup to work) I got made fun of on the discord which goes with the general vibe of getting support on discord so I wasn't mad at all, and eventually figured it out. The wiki does need a lot of work because I followed it and installing the recommended terminal emulator (kitty) was what caused a lot of hair pulling. Ghostty works far better.

Drew DeVault detailed that your Discord experience is not unusual

https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html

> sway is not far off in quality

You mean it is better or worse in your experience?

didn't use sway for long enough to form an opinion. it did feel kind of workhorse-ish and boring which in hindsight is probably better. I was curious to see what I would get on a fairly old (intel iGPU) machine in terms of sheer performance with hyprland given it is fully GPU-accelerated through OpenGL and it was refreshing honestly. it's easy to see how they thought they could monetize it, pure looks and raw performance are very appealing to end-users.

the websites for both are a nice heuristic imo.

Sway is way more stable, just less eye candy (which is great). Hyperland is practically a fork (wlroots) by a single dev.

It's hasn't been performant for me all the 3 times I've tried. It kept chugging an entire CPU core. Never had a similar experience with Sway, it's still extremely responsive and light on the system (especially with Vulkan).

Some context for anyone unfamiliar with the linux desktop space:

Hyprland is a "wayland compositor" (roughly analogous to an X Window Manager) that is under active community development: https://hypr.land

Wayland is considered the future of the linux desktop and is what projects like Valve's SteamDeck are using: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

It's known that Hyprland Premium is going to include a bunch of pre-made dotfiles including a Quickshell bar config, if you want to see the current top-tier rice: https://quickshell.outfoxxed.me/

Never heard of quickshell, that looks impressive.

Quickshell demo looks cool, but how are they going to keep people subscribed? I mean once you have the dotfile(s) you can just bounce and if they are just dotfiles users can just share them.

This is the only DE/WM I have ever heard of having "premium" features. I don't have a problem with the developers trying to bring in some funding but this is bizarre.

I predict there is around a 0% chance that someone won't fork hyprland and implement the premium features themselves. Especially in this scene.

And that's fine. The people who would use such a fork were never going to pay anyways.

I doubt anyone wants to touch/maintain hyprland. Niri and sway? Much more likely to see outside contributions IMO.

I'm going to sub because the lead dev is a college kid who's poured his heart and soul into this thing I use every day. It's really just a donation and I think it's good of him to try to monetize somehow.

AFAIR, Aston Shell (for Windows) had free/premium editions

I really don't understand why all the lazy complaints about how the 'purchase a hyprland premium subscription' page doesn't provide an exhaustive explanation of what Hyprland is are top of this comments section. The homepage, at https://hypr.land, does that pretty well.

As for the move by the hyprland maintainers to go down this freemiumesque route (which I assume is why this link was actually posted and is top of HN), all I'll say is that Niri[0] is absolutely fantastic, and I expect it's about to get even more popular.

[0]: https://github.com/yalter/niri

I've got absolutely no problem with them taking donations / having a premium option. But it is very difficult to comment on when there is no indication what the premium experience brings.

I dunno if they changed the website since it was posted... But it literally lists exactly what you get?

(Basically, nothing, it's more or less a donation)

> Premium Desktop Experience (soon)

It doesn't explain what the "premium" desktop features will be or what it will include over standard Hyprland

Dedicated (not community) support tends to generally be the default offering. Orion browser has the same: https://kagi.com/orion/orionplus.html

Great. If they can make some money out of this, why not?

I wonder what happens if they lock down some features as premium-only. The competition is tight in this space and there are tons of alternatives to Hyprland, like Sway, River, etc. Monetizing open-source code sounds like a dangerous path...

There's not a lot of competition yet.

Sway is good, but lots of fantastic WMs with great UIs are still stuck in X. Needing a massive re-write doesn't help.

My personal favorites (XMonad, StumpWM, and EXWM) have all tried but failed to get ported to Wayland.

Tiling window managers on Wayland still are pretty early sadly.

I've been using Niri for a solid year, it's been great.

https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

Yeah I'm in the element chat of that. They are still pretty early.

Niri is in the exact same style of smoothly animated tiled columns sliding around, and it's much more pleasant as a community/project. And if you care, it's in Rust not C++.

https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

There needs to be more opinionated / zero configuration setups in the Linux desktop space. The PopOS! tiling mode is miles easier to setup.

Ghostty's popularity also seems to hit on those developers.

I really hope that Hyprand premium does magic with those insights.

+1 for the COSMIC tiling system

I'm a big fan of Hyprland and have made a Fedora Atomic based setup using it across multple devices. I migrated from a few years of using Manjaro Sway. It feels streamlined and I really like how clean the configuration is - keeping multiple machines operating the same is mostly just syncing .config/hypr

This reminds me that I've been meaning to donate, but this page feels... unfinished? The links don't work and there's no explanation of what you get from premium.

What does "Premium Desktop Experience" actually mean?

I feel like they had to keep it in the incubator for a little longer but the idea of a zero config twm is a thing I could pay for if my config ever crashes and burns.

Beats being on Apple/Microsoft

Premium support with a foss product seems like a win-win idea. Hope it goes well. Reminds me to donate to the stuff I use daily.

I've been using Hyprland now for 4 months and it's my first tiling WM experience. I absolutely love it and actually donated 10 euro to the dev(s?).

Having said that: This is simply not mature enough yet to warrant a 60 euro a year subscription, regardless of premium features.

To be clear, I do see the potential and I would actually pay it but this is too early.

Hasn't Hyprland been in the works for years? Maybe try Niri or sway. Sway is rock solid IME.

Apologies, I should have been more specific. "Mature" was a reference to its feature set, not its stability. It runs fine in my setup. I meant things like automatic resolution and scale switching, for example, without having to edit my config file Indeed, I can script that myself, I will. My point is more that if that's the kind of thing I need to do myself, then I'm not paying 60 euro a year.

I do like hyprland, Its what I have installed. I hope they can offer 5$. of value to people with their 'premium' experience, I just think its either way too little or way too much additional support for what their price suggests.

Things that are close to this value proposition:

Video streaming services

Online game subscriptions

Data backups

VPN

Very few of these actually offer anything for 5$ a month and they do not offer 'customer support' or 'forum support' in the way you would probaly expect from people that offer that for your linux desktop. If anything, I expect the value proposition to be more like custom art pieces, where someone actually sits down with you for an hour, writes down what you want and programs up an entirely artisic desktop representation for whatever theme/idea you have. That would cost hundreds of dollars and would be a far better value proposition and the person in question could always be called upon for aftercare and newer projects.

This feels more like a wake-up call to make people donate for the products they use, which I'm all for.

I have no experience with owning a product but I assume that if donations don't succeed you have to opt for these methods

It's surprising to me that attractive, GPU-accelerated window compositing is not a 100% solved problem in the Linux ecosystem. I'm assuming I'm missing some huge technical challenge. Does anyone have the ELI5 on this?

It really is a solved problem. This is just one window manager out of tens that is trying a new method for monetising (or sustaining) the project. I don't think there's much to learn from it about any technical challenges.

It is a solved problem but because of how Wayland works, window managers are also compositors, so if you want to make a new window manager you are actually technically making a "compositor", although most of the small ones just implement window management on top of wlroots.

Most people would just use kde or gnome which have their own compositors.

> It's surprising to me that attractive, GPU-accelerated window compositing is not a 100% solved problem in the Linux ecosystem.

It is - kwin has been doing this for a long time, both on X and now on Wayland.

The problem is that the Linux desktop is composed of mostly open-source software. So people are going to make their own things, fork whatever you make, whatever. There's no one true "blessed" method like we see on Windows or Mac because that's literally impossible on Linux. There's no one corporation or entity strangle-holding the desktop to how they want it done.

I’d happily pay for it to support the devs. I like hypr

The Discord "Nitro" of window managers (with the same demographic I would guess)?

Its so OVER.

How to fail at a product website lesson #1: Don't describe the purpose and show the experience of your product on the home page.

I have no idea what "Hyperland" is.

It is weird, this is their main website: https://hypr.land/

Which has a demo. This website seems to only be for the account / payments.

This landing page also fails to properly describe anything I understand.

It's sway with eye-candy. (Or, if you don't know about sway, the Wayland version of i3 — also with eye-candy).

If you're still not sure, you're simply not the target audience, these things almost always require further learning and customization, so some level of gate-keeping from the start is helpful.

Yep this - you’re not the target audience. It’s a UI desktop layer for Linux, made for the enthusiast.

But also, OP posted a link that is not mobile friendly (at least on safari) and doesn’t say much about what this is. The main page does a fine job though (for those would care I guess).

Then that's honestly not on them.

There’s got to be a term for this given how I see it daily: when experts are so hyper focused that they’re not even aware they might have to at least indicate what a compositor even is.

I think a common response is that if you don’t know, you’re not the audience anyways. But that lops off your customer funnel and limits the general awareness of your product. You want to bring everyone one step closer to your product from wherever they are.

average familiarity [1] comes to mind.

1 https://xkcd.com/2501/

That’s perfect.

In the case of niche, power user focused products like this I think it’s actually reasonable to assume the target audience should know what a compositor is.

For projects like this that come with some assembly required, having a light filter on your funnel can actually be beneficial. Cast too wide of a net and you collect a lot of people who aren’t qualified to use the product but expect a lot of support anyway.

It looks really horrible

Only if you already know what "compositor" means in this context.

> Modern compositor with the looks

> Hyprland provides the latest Wayland features, dynamic tiling, all the eyecandy, powerful plugins and much more, while still being lightweight and responsive

If you're in the market for a Wayland compositor you should know what compositor means. If you're not in the market for a Wayland compositor then I can't imagine you'd ever need to know anything about hyprland.

Imagine if you will a site where links are shared amongst a very tech-heavy audience. I for one think it's reasonable for the average HN reader to understand the sites linked to.

"If you don't understand it, you don't belong" is a crap attitude. They wanted to learn, if they didn't they wouldn't be asking what it means. What happened to good writing?

It's not about being tech-heavy, it's about specifically running a Linux desktop on a distribution where you're running a very modern software stack, and you're not using a bundled desktop, so you're in the market for a compositor built for Wayland.

That's just a very specific usecase. You can be extremely tech-heavy but if you run Windows then this wouldn't matter to you.

I'm a very tech-heavy guy, and no, I don't understand everything linked on HN because it's just outside of my scope. Anything with Mac OS? Couldn't tell you.

That's my point. If given a link to a random article about macOS details, I expect to be able to identify it as such, and not just be completely baffled. As a macOS user looking at the Hyprland page, you won't even know if it's meant for macOS, Windows, Linux, Android -- even the idea that it's software is only by implication.

I clicked 3 different links failing at answering that question for myself and then I stopped caring, though not enough to pass up one-upping your comment.

If ypu have no idea you probably dont want it tough

That assumes that everyone who wants your product already knows about it, which is true of zero products.

When the core of the "product" is support, it feels quite safe to say that if you don't know what hyprland is you'd probably won't be interested in hyprland support.

Agreed, but for this particular product, the number is probably a lot closer to zero than average.

It's a tiling window manager for a few Linux distros.

Arch, not Ubuntu.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all&searchon=names&...

Sure, but their own install page recommends against it:

> distros like Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, etc. will have major issues running Hyprland.

> How to fail at a product website

..but they've been really successful in their niche..

maybe your intuition is off?

Neither the developers of Hypr nor the users care about having a good "product website" calling a window manager a product in the first place is already weird and just kinda shows you aren't the target audience.

Not everything is trying to be the next iPhone.

I miss simple Windows-like experience in Linux. I fondly remember GNOME 2 days. It was the best Linux experience I've ever had. Task bar with open window buttons and workspace switches. Icon tray. Start menu. It just worked. These days it's either GNOME with its weird approach to UI, KDE with infinite number of settings that put me into depression the moment I open their control panel or those weird tiled WMs which I have zero interest in, because I almost never split my screen, all my windows are maximised 99% of time.

XFCE

Literally all desktop environments other than GNOME provide the experience you are looking for. Even GNOME can be made to act like that with customizations, e.g. https://zorin.com/os/

I think XFCE works for it, but yeah it seems like everyone is begging for the old Windows, SerenityOS style (or insert whatever else here) experience

This is easy to accomplish.

> I fondly remember GNOME 2 days. It was the best Linux experience I've ever had.

You can just use MATE, which is just GNOME 2 forked and continued.

> KDE with infinite number of settings that put me into depression the moment I open their control panel

Okay, then don't do that. KDE's defaults are fine. The fact that options exist is not harmful to you.

> or those weird tiled WMs which I have zero interest in, because I almost never split my screen, all my windows are maximised 99% of time.

You can use i3/sway with

  workspace_layout tabbed

and have all your windows maximized unless you explicitly force them to do something else.

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