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Comment by hd4 | Hacker News Reader

The real story with Omarchy is Hyprland. Feels like the first time the desktop Linux is not only fun but that there's a far better case being made for switching to desktop Linux over Windows, not only because of less resource usage, but also a new (old) paradigm in tiling windows, repackaged in a way that doesn't make people want to smash their computer.

Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.

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I can absolutely echo your sentiment. I recently released some software which has Wayland support. Immediately, I got some bug reports from Hyprland users so I setup a partition with EndeavourOS + Hyprland to work out the issues. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, as you said, the defaults are nice. Configuring it was a breeze as well. Now about 2 weeks later I am daily driving the system I setup for testing and am working to switch fully to it from macOS.

What was the hyprland-specific issue?

They were definitely my fault, to be clear. There was a crash at launch (I don't remember the cause exactly) and being unable to copy to clipboard when using the wlr-layer-shell extension. Those likely affected other compositors, but I did not catch them on Gnome when I was doing the majority of development and testing.

Windows still has advantages for certain use cases, as much as I want to like Hyprland for everything.

For example, imagine this screencast recording set up:

    - You have a 4k monitor
    - You only want to record a 1920x1080 section of your screen (OBS can do this in both set ups)
    - You only want certain windows to appear in that 1920x1080 zone
    - You want other adhoc windows (notepad, etc.) floating around that recording zone
    - You want to easily be able to pick and flip between the apps in that 1920x1080 zone

On Windows this is quite possible and requires almost nothing to be done. You could install a tool like Sizer to resize and position windows into a specific spot and just drag / drop everything else around as needed. You could also optimize things with AHK to make it easier to only open apps in that zone.

With Hyprland this isn't as easy to pull off. A maintainer mentioned to me that I'd likely have to write a Hyprland plugin which would be C++. I'm not a C++ developer though.

I guess you could probably make a workable but not as good solution by hyprctl dispatching commands in a shell script to position specific windows into the zone and then have a notepad like app dedicated to always floating, but when you record hundreds of videos you want an optimized solution to the highest degree.

In Hyprland's defense I've only been using it for a few days but I saw nothing in their docs or the internet that would indicate there's features built into the tool to make this less painful.

If I could find a solution for this, I'd install it on my main machine.

I haven’t the tried Hyprland, but I use i3, which I assume it should be similar. I do this sort of thing quite often when presenting on zoom at work. Suppose I want to present only the top-left section of my screen, then I split vertically first and the left side I split horizontally. This other 2 zones I use to put other supporting windows and to search stuff out of screen. When I need to present more apps, i3 also allow you to stack windows in a specific zone. It’s quite easy to switch between all the windows and have full control of the layout.

I'm probably not thinking about your use case the same way you are, but it seems like you could run a nested hyprland session in a 1920x1080 window and screenshare just the nested hyprland window. Run the apps you want to share inside that nested hyprland session.

I don't know of any reason that wouldn't work, but I haven't tried it so I'm not certain it would.

I didn't even know that was possible but I think it would be the perfect solution, as long as it ran efficiently and managing the hotkeys between both sessions wasn't a problem. I wonder how that would work if you used the same configs.

If it were possible to pull off, that would be the perfect combo:

    - A dedicated 1920x1080 recording zone, using Hyrpland's config file to automatically resize and position this Hyprland session in whatever spot makes the most sense (top middle of a 4k monitor, etc.)
    - The nested session could use 1.5x or 2x scaling so fonts are larger on video[0]
    - There's no BS or manual steps because the nested session is a full fledged Hyprland set up, so tiling, floats, workspaces and app launching is fully working
    - Free to float whatever you want around the recording zone from the main Hyprland set up

[0]: On Windows with WSL 2 I work around this with a shell script I made to adjust my terminal's font size, etc.. I'd love to be able to drop that and have things be perfectly sized all the time when recording.

Edit:

The Hyprland docs mentions you should make a separate config and also avoid running any exec/exec-once commands. That could be a problem because I would want my wallpaper, mako, waybar and walker to come up in the videos which means running multiple copies of these.

Maybe it could work tho in the end. I will play with it and see how it goes. Thank you for introducing me to the idea, even if it doesn't work, it's an interesting concept.

I've only used it for testing/debugging so I didn't need any of that capability. I'm not sure why they recommend avoiding exec in the config. Since it would still be under the same user session, dbus things could get wonky. Nested hyprland will automatically create/use ~/.config/hypr/hyprlandd.conf and you'll def want to have unique keybinds. If you haven't gone too crazy with keybinds, just changing the main mod key (I used capslock) in the nested config should take care of most things.

Thanks yeah, I didn't go too crazy with binds yet. Maybe ALT + TAB is the only thing that's not using the main mod key.

It's probably going to get complicated though due to wanting to run waybar, walker, wallpaper, etc. in the nested session but if you do anything that's going to modify its state in that session is also going to affect the outer one since only 1 process runs for those tools.

It's almost like you need a separate copy for everything that runs in exec but with a different process name too.

Yep. I’ve done this with Niri, too. It’s a really nice capability.

How did you end up managing things like waybar?

You'd end up with 2 copies of it running and you typically killall/pkill to reload it because it's expected you'd only run 1 copy but now with this nested solution there's 2 copies running.

The only thing really stopping me from Niri is it doesn't seem to have dynamic configs to let you have 1 main config and then source in a smaller 2nd config to overwrite settings in the main config.

That's really useful for having personalized changes per device or overwriting specific colors to change themes.

Hyprland has a `source` feature for this.

I hear Hyprland second only to Gnome in the NixOS world (where it's arguably easier to try different desktop environments compared to e.g. Ubuntu).

Now it could just be that Hyprland users are more vocal than XFCE or plasma users, so it's not definitive, but it definitely has "buzz"

yes as an hyprland user, the community is definitely more vocal. I myself convinced one of my friends to use hyprland fedora as his first linux experience which is wild

(I also use nixos too but I use nix plasma and arch hyprland, i mean I barely use nix, arch is my goto but you get my point)

I agree it has buzz but its just cool open source software man, I like it. it isn't as plug n play even still as plasma or gnome for example but that's the point. Makes for a really good minimalist system but for me somethings don't usually work that "just" work on other desktop environments but I learnt a lot and now its a really enjoyable experience.

One example I can give of where I really had a big issue with hyprland was consistent schema around every application. I think its still broken on my system for qt apps which I had fixed but then broke again I think, but I now don't have the time to fix it and its a minor inconvenience at best. nothing wrong to hyprland, that's just fundamentally how it works if you try hyprland like me.

Omarchy seems to be promising the premise of hyprland with "it just works" Maybe if my arch system bricks, I will give omarchy a try. Untill then, I am happy with my theme and hyprland. Its cool. Dhh is also cool for making omarchy tbh.

The reason it's wild is someone has managed to make a tiling WM that isn't just usable and nice, but actually created incredible hype around it, and made people want to give it a chance and switch away from something as entrenched as DEs. It's really a wondrous achievement, something the majority of the Linux community never thought could be done until it was.

Yes, I agree.

Although I don't necessarily agree with the hyprland's main dev's responses on many github issues (which sound crude/rude to me) and I think that the community from what I've heard has also become just a little toxic on things like discord but I feel like sometimes we need to seperate the art from the artist and hyprland is picking even more hype so the main's dev's crudeness can be tucked away even more so. To be honest, thinking about it, even linus is crude yet the penguin (tux/linux) is universally loved (for the most part) So yeah. for the most part, I like hyprland.

Well he is a 22 year old kid.

That's... surprising. GNOME and Nix has very contrasting philosophies.

Anyways, Hyprland is primarily driven by the Arch side of things, considering that:

* there are way more Arch users than Nix users

* Arch is much more trendy amongst non-developer/Linux users.

* Arch is easier to setup and use - less friction

* Arch is more popular in the unixporn reddit/YouTube world, which is where Hyprland gained much of its popularity

* the Hyprland developer uses Arch, and has recently started selling customized dot files, advertised as "supported on Arch- based and Fedora distributions."

Nix users are simply not a driving force in the Linux userland world.

1. GNOME is the 800lb gorilla of linux DEs, so I would be surprised if it weren't the most common DE on any distro that doesn't default to something else.

2. I didn't mean to imply that Hyperland is driven by NixOS (NixOS is niche enough I doubt it drives anything); just that it seems to have hype on NixOS. I use NixOS, I'm semi-active in the NixOS community, and I regularly interact with NixOS users. I don't regularly interact with anybody that uses Arch, so why would I comment on the Arch community?

Is Hyperland the thing that finally convinces hacker types that Wayland is the future? A Wayland compositor that gives you Xorg like scripting via a UNIX control socket, easy to set up, and is much much less opinionated than GNOME.

So many of the criticisms of Wayland around the internet end up being things that Mutter doesn't let you control directly.

It's less a Wayland story imo and more a tiling WM story.

Right! Which is my point. It's finally a "killer app." It's not a situation where the Wayland thing is technically better but to a user is essentially the same except new $limitations. Now there's a new cool trendy thing that happens to run on Wayland. Folks will want to make the switch to get the new shiny.

Hyperland is one part (it's amazing), but the other is a distro embracing the keyboard 100% and not treating it as an option where I need to think about how to set it up.

The only problem I have is that I bought a new beelink Pro9, put Omarchy on it and Hyperland locks up every day, and I don't know if it’s only me or not.

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