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.