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Which desktop environment do your friends use?

They started with Hyprland, GNOME or KDE Plasma. Most of them have ended up using Cinnamon, and the rest use XFCE.

hyprland is a fun spectacle, but takes insane effort to make remotely livable. Also any apparent shortcut (dotfiles) will do nasty damage to your install. Anyone hypr-curious should sandbox in an install they don't mind wiping.

I’m really curious about your experience, what distro you used hyprland on, what dotfiles did damage to your install etc.

I just installed hyprland yesterday and outside of having to switch back to i3 once to install what they had set for a terminal in their default config(kitty), I haven’t had to leave again.

Asahi and hyde. "Nasty damage" isn't irreparable, but it would be significant effort to enumerate every small touch that affects defaults from other DEs and restore them. There is no "restore all touched configs to default" afaik. Since my asahi install was a lightly used toy anyway I just reinstalled. My next attempt will be with a VM that I make image backups of.

What does hyprland offer over i3?

From my experience, nice decorations. I haven't gone further than getting a top bar set up and getting my normal shortcuts setup.

I'm sure I'm not getting everything everything I could out of it.

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