I switched to Hyprland after being an i3 user for 6 years

A bit of context

I’m a Linux desktop user for about 8 years, last 6 of which I’ve been sticking with i3.

A few weeks ago I replaced my NVIDIA GPU with AMD and got an HDR-compatible monitor. I’ve been wanting to try Wayland for quite a while, so I decided that it’s as good time as ever to give Hyprland a go.

Switch to Hyprland

I could’ve gone with Sway with minimal changes to my i3 config, but I decided it’s more fun to explore an entirely different WM/ecosystem. Even though at the end of the day I configured all keyboard shortcuts exactly the same way I had them in i3.

It took me a couple of hours to get familiar with Hyprland config format, and by the end of the day I had my entire i3 config migrated.

Waybar was quite a bit harder for me, since it uses JSON instead of TOML and it uses CSS for styling. It took me a couple of days to fully configure it. But I ended up liking the look more than I had in Polybar!

For Hyprlock I just found someone’s config online and heavily customized it.

Problems

After figuring out Wayland-specifics (such as portals) and finding Wayland-native alternatives to some programs, it’s been a surprisingly smooth sailing. Most of the stuff I use daily (terminal emulator, VSCode, browsers, Godot) is already Wayland-native, while other things, such as my DAW (Bitwig) and gaming, work flawlessly through XWayland, except for the lack of fractional scaling, which is not a big deal in my case.

I noticed that Waybar’s mpd module is a lot less responsive than it was in Polybar. I investigated the source code a bit, and it turns out the module status is refreshed only every 1 second during the playing state, which is a lot slower than in Polybar. I opened a pull request adding an option to make this interval configurable, hopefully it will get merged soon.

There’s one annoyance I face from time to time - the primary clipboard may start continuously reverting to a value that I copied earlier. Say, if I copied a string “foo”, then copied a bunch of other stuff in between, at some point when I try copying “bar”, the clipboard gets overriden with “foo” within milliseconds. I tracked it down to XWayland - closing all X11 programs seems to fix the problem. But I have no idea how to actually fix it. It’s not a big deal since it doesn’t happen often, but if you know the solution, please email me. :-)

HDR

I never experienced HDR in my life, so I was intrigued to see if I can get it working on my new monitor.

I tried to play HDR content with mpv, and altough Hyprland initially showed a warning “Wide color gamut is enabled but the display is not in 10bit mode”, on the second try the warning was gone, and it seemed to work - the bright colors pop a little bit more.

But I imagine because my monitor only has entry-level HDR (probably HDR400), the diffirence was negligible. Or maybe the monitor wasn’t actually running in 10bit mode like Hyprland warned and it didn’t work at all. I have no idea, since I have nothing to compare it with.

Tear-free

I’m the kind of person that always turns VSync off in games, since I am unable to notice any tearing even if I try to pay attention to it. My friend, however, is very quick to point it out when he sees a game being played on my PC. After switching to Wayland, this problem seems to be gone. No tearing anywhere - even with VSync off. Not a big deal for me, but still pretty cool.

Is Wayland better than X11?

I mean, probably? But honestly, after setting everything up I practically can’t tell any difference. At the end of the day, it’s just a display server - which is not something most users care about. But I always loved to be on cutting edge, and I’m looking forward to any cool Wayland developments that are coming in the future.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! If you’re curious about my Linux journey prior to Hyprland, I wrote in greater detail about it in a separate blog post.