Switching To Wayland: Why I'm Daily Driving Hyprland

Key Takeaways

if you've seen my desktop in the past couple of videos you might have noticed that something seemed a touch different mostly the same but slightly off if you put them side by side it's gonna be like one of those Spot the Difference puzzles and there's a very good reason for that this is not awesome WM this is not exorg and this is not an extension of that April Fool's Day video this is completely serious I am now daily driving Weyland using the hyperlan compositor and I've been doing so for maybe a week or two at this point I'm not exactly sure but I've got enough time to at least give my initial Impressions I'm gonna wait a bit longer to do a full overview on all of my thoughts on hyperlend but for today's video this is not the first time I've actually used hyperland you might remember a good couple of months ago I actually made a video on it I didn't really use it long term it was sort of my initial Impressions back then as well and I want to say it was version 0.13 and it was okay back then the main reason why I didn't go in Daily drive it then is it wasn't exactly that stable the reason I went with that version in particular is the prior version caused my screen to violently flash so it wasn't exactly usable I wanted to give the project a bit more time to mature iron out a lot of those bugs and try to become an actual project that is worth daily driving on a production system now I am running 0.23 and honestly it doesn't even feel like I'm using the same hyperland it feels like a completely separate project besides the still kinda wonky the way the configuration is done many of those old bugs actually most of them all of the ones that I could find anyway seem to be completely gone yes it's not perfect and it's still a little bit rough around the edges but it's actually usable now now considering the positive words I've had for sway many of you are probably thinking why hyperland instead of just using Sway and for a very long time I would have agreed with you if I was going to daily Drive Wayland sway just seemed like the most obvious option I know River and dwo absolutely have their fans and I'm sure they are great compositors as well but sway is basically the no compromises w o root compositor sway does basically everything you could really want it to do it has all the power of w roots and also has the power of the I3 IPC I can control every window on my desktop the exact same way I would have done on I3 it's really cool and it is really powerful so even though it is a manual tiler because of this power there are scripts to make it work like a dynamic tailor and make it just so much more comfortable and actually productive to use but that's basically where it stopped sway is really really rock solid and includes a lot of stuff that isn't included in many of the other WL Roots compositors but it's still really missing a lot of the stuff that I and many other people want now while there is this great work being done with xdg desktop portals to make Global shortcuts on whale and you know actually a thing and fit into the whale and security model and in the long run this is going to be the far better option to go with right now no applications you actually want Global shortcuts in actually support the global shortcuts portal so it doesn't really matter hyperlend on the other hand has had a working global hotkey system Global shortcut whatever you want to call it working for quite a while now and I was completely unaware of it the last time I used hyperland right now I am focused on a terminal window and the hotkeys I have set up for obs actually do the thing they are supposed to be doing I can use all of them perfectly fine no questions asked whatsoever Leica would be able to on xorg on Mac OS on Windows I don't care how anybody else uses OBS for me if I don't have access to my hotkeys the application is basically unusable and right now the only place that I know of on W roots that has a working global hotkey system is hyperland so that by itself is already massive points to hyperland and the way it works actually is pretty straightforward this right here is my hyperlan config ignore most of the comments most of them are from the example config and don't really matter anymore I probably should go and delete them the important part is this section here though these bind commands now bind is the same thing you use when setting up your general desktop hotkeys like say full screening a window opening up D menu things like that but in this case we are changing the dispatcher being used in those ones we're using the exact dispatcher for exacting a command in this case we are using the past dispatcher for sending that key into something that we specify so the first section here on the left hand side of the first comma this is going to be your modifier key I'm not using modifier key here but in some cases I'm using things like you know shift main mod things like that but for sending Keys into OBS none of my keys are using a modifier so that section remains blank but it still needs to be there the second bit is the key we are using so keypad 0 that's on my num pad all the way up to nine also I'm sending in the F Keys there's a good reason I'm doing both of those then we are using the pass dispatcher all of the dispatches are explained over on the hyperlen wiki the hyperlane wiki is always going to be your friend and then the third section is the thing that we are sending it into we are using a regex here to match to the OBS window now as for the F keys and the numpad normally I would like to be using the numpad it gives me a visual indication of where the camera is going to go so I press the number seven for example it would go into the top left corner if I press the number uh one for example that would go into the bottom left and I normally would have my full screen on five the problem is um for some reason it doesn't work in hyperlens this problem has been reported and I've been going back and forth with vaxery trying to work out what the problem is but the numpad is not working globally but everything else is I have no idea why I'm sure sure there's some sort of problem maybe it's in High Plain maybe it's an OBS but the both of us are kinda stumped and on the topic of OBS hyperland actually has a fork of the W root implementation of the xdg portal this is aptly called xdg desktop portal hyperland almost succinctly xdph if you ever see mention of that in the wiki and issues and things like that this is what they are referring to and the reason why they have a fork is they're actually functions available in this that aren't available in other W Roots desktops one of those being is window capture actually working so in uh the regular version of w Roots if I wanted to go and capture you know say this browser window technically I could go and like capture the entire screen and go and crop it but does that window ever moved I would then have to go and you know move it around in hyperland I can just capture this perfectly fine and it just works this is also very important to me because this is how I have the browser displayed when I'm doing a podcast window capture not working is not a Weyland issue it is not an issue on gnome it is not an issue on KDE it is just an issue on W roots and hyperland actually fixes it while it's unquestionably better than the way it works over on sway there are still some issues I have with the hyperlens portal one of them being every time I open up OBS I have to go and you know reselect the windows this is fairly normal in a portal but over I believe in is it KDE organome it actually might be both of them now it can actually save your last selection so you can just automatically go through and everything just worked the same way it did before so if I have you know multiple Selections in OBS I need to go and reset those up not just every time I open up OBS but every time I change like you know an entirely different scene collection the other thing which I don't know if it can be fixed is the window it shows you doesn't tell you what you are selecting for so if you do have multiple things you might actually go you know place a window where there should be a screen place a screen where there should be a window and you have to just go and rearrange them it's not a major deal and I don't know if there's any way to pass that data from OBS into the portal so if there's not that's fine there's nobody to fix it but if there is some way to do it that would be awesome but that's not the only stuff that's a little bit rough this right here is Caden live I'll give you just a second to spot the problem if you said this right here because that's my wallpaper and Kaden live is see-through for some reason you would be correct now this isn't an issue specifically on hyperland this seems to be generally an issue with certain themes on double your roots I don't exactly know why I haven't found a good solution for it yet what it kind of is what it is it doesn't really matter none of the important elements are see-through is just this border around the edge I can totally work with it one that's a bit harder to work with is the problem with X whale and file managers this is just a problem on hyperland let's say I want to grab this picture of sephiroth here and I want to go and drop it into Discord on anything else I could just drop it over I didn't let go of my cursor there um yeah I can't drag it out of the window and this seems to be the case with every X Whalen file manager you can get a bit of a better experience using a native Wayland file manager but I don't want to do that then I shouldn't have to they should work they work on sway they work on everything else I don't know why they don't work here but even if I did use a native Weyland file manager it would only let me drag files into other native whale and windows like Caden live and things like that Discord Brave and a bunch of other applications I use run through X Weyland so it's a bit of a problem I was also seeing this really weird problem while playing ff14 not moving my mouse whatsoever to control the camera just pressing my mouse buttons and seemingly out of nowhere seemingly completely randomly my camera snaps up looking at the ground I'm not the only one who's seen this in ff14 and I'm not the only one who's seeing this in gaming generally I've seen similar reports in games like Guild Wars 2 and other things like that I don't know why no one knows why and it's not a problem exclusive to hyperland it seems to happen generally on Weyland it happens on sway it happens on KDE and it's really annoying and it's a problem luckily running the game in game scope completely eliminates the problem so just do that now before someone says hey Brody why are you coming complaining about these inner video why don't you report these problems to the developer they have been all of these problems have been reported to the developer and I and many other people have been going back and forth with them trying to work out what the problem is he has been very active trying to work in these problems but some of them aren't exactly clear what the issue is and what is going wrong in hyperlen what is going wrong in double your roots maybe it's the application that you know you're trying to work with that's the problem where the problem actually is some of these problems turn out to be a little bit more difficult than we expected the other Kate life problem he just added AR work around where you can just force extra opacity and it dealt with it so that's not a problem anymore at least on the get version I don't believe it's made its way into a stable release yet so as it currently stands I am mostly happy with hyperland it isn't perfect it seems to be a kind of reduced experience compared to exorg but it's not so reduced that I can't actually use it it is so much better than using Sway and I'm kind of at the point where if someone wants to use a tiling Window Manager on Weyland hyperland is probably one of the better options to go with unless you want to use a tiling plugin with something like KDE which is you know totally an option but that's up to you so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below what do you run do you run xor do you run Weyland have you tried a hype land what do you think of it or have you never used it and have an opinion on it I would love to know so if you liked the video go and like the video and if you really like the video and want to become one of it these amazing people over here check out the patreon scrub study therapy Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and peace out [Applause] [Music]