The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth.
Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep.
Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
Ah... that makes sense. I hadn't heard of Hey before but it appears Hey World is a pretty newly added feature to a platform primarily built for & around email - attachments do make some deal of sense in that context, though I'd imagine I might still like to browse image attachments in my email client from time to time rather than stash them in downloads.
Might just be teething issues for a new product though.
I might be in the minority but I actually like overlapping windows - often the entire window is not necessary to get the data I am interested in. Right now I'm running tests in another window and I have a sliver of that window visible while the majority of the screen real-estate gets used for the browser in primary window.
I'm beginning to really like scrolling window managers.
It's optimized for minimal splits (let's say 2-3 windows) per view but it makes it effortless to flip between apps. Floating windows is also an option and making any of them full screen is available too.
Imagine tiling a bunch of pieces of paper on your floor and now you want to focus on a few of them at a time. That's basically what a scrolling window manager allows, you can either swipe on a touchpad, hit the arrow keys or use your mouse wheel to cycle between stuff. Of course you can customize these, that's just a reasonable default.
It's so much faster than manually dealing with workspaces IMO.
I'm currently taking a look into both Hyprland's scrolling plugins and if that fails then Niri. I wish Hyprland's official scrolling plugin was not in an alpha state. I want to stick with Hyprland because everything else about it is really nice.
All of this stuff works independent of Omarchy too since it's 100% related to your window manager.
Indeed, although I find hyprshot + satty a pretty good combo. It's almost as good as Flameshot.
I think it's really important to be able to take a region, specific window or full display screenshot with an ability to annotate afterwards and then also have an option to save to disk or copy to clipboard depending on what you want to do for that screenshot.
Flameshot was ideal because it lets you adjust the region size while also having the annotation controls at the same time. All of these other solutions don't let you adjust the region during annotation time since you're piping the image data into a different annotation tool.
I recently switched to niri from sway. I do like it ... There's something nice and spatial about it that makes keeping track of what's where really easy.
Yep. It keeps getting better. I was recently in the market for a new laptop, and Niri is partly why I didn’t buy a MacBook. It’s hard for me to imagine going back to osx.
I recall being able to set FVWM2 desktop size larger than the screen size. Some people went really large with this, but I found it way too easy to lose track of windows. I’m curious as to how these new window managers are different.
I'm not a big fan of "workspaces" but I do love tiling WM with multiple screens.
My desktop at home is Ubuntu + i3 but I keep experimenting on my laptop with different WM. It's currently running Regolith but I'm probably going to try Omarchy 2.0...2.1 maybe? Let it simmer a little.
I saw a scrolling WM video recently and _loved_ what I saw, just too busy to set it up right now. Lots of potential there.
> Sort of like those blackboards / whiteboards that you can roll around.
Yes exactly. Since I was a kid, I always envisioned a future world where all of my walls were a monitor and I could just move across them as needed to focus on things. A scrolling manager isn't quite that but it's in the right direction.
I don't like switching between full screen windows because mentally it's so much easier (IMO) to keep things in context when I see all the important things at once. I want to see my code, the terminal output, search results and the docs in 1 view but when I don't care about the search results and docs I want to quickly throw them off to the side, but still have them available if needed on demand.
Situational splitting with scrolling allows for the above without the cognitive load of hitting a million hotkeys to move things to workspaces and balance your splits.
I've always felt like with traditional tiled window managers you're trading 1 problem for another. Instead of meddling with every floated window's size and position you're meddling with split sizes and workspace management.
> What's your favorite?
It's too soon to say as I've only recently discovered them. I do think Niri and Hyprland with https://github.com/cpiber/hyprscroller or https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins are places to start. Niri has scrolling as a first class feature. The first Hyprland link is a fork of a deprecated plugin and the 2nd link is an official new plugin but it's super bare bones and a big WIP.
(CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.
Same here, multiple monitors, overlapping windows has never worked for me. I don't need big monitors for the same reason. I also make sure to keep the number of things I have open to a minimum. Then simply tabbing or using a tiling manager like i3 (without using actual tiling) (they are just faster than running full desktops). It also means I can be productive with any setup anywhere e.g. a laptop
I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you.
Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.
I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.
I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.
In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
Using SUPER+F for toggling fullscreen and SUPER+TAB to switch workspaces is basically the same workflow - it's just so much easier to customize Hyprland to be the exact way you want and Omarchy is a wonderful foundation for it. I found it had much better defaults and more intuitive customization than the Hyprland Hyprperks setup https://account.hypr.land/pricing
I have all my windows centered but pyramid stacked. I can see a bit of everything but my main browser is in the center. Slack is in the upper right, and the browser leaves a bit of the Slack screen open. I keep Obsidian in the lower left such that I can see the organization panel.. it helps me keep a mental map of the notes I'm working with.
In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.
I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.
When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.
You’re not alone. I can’t make full-time tiling or even tiling-dominant work for me. With how my mind works, full floating 98% of the time with the occasional tile is the right blend. I tile so infrequently that tiling being keybound has net zero impact.
Majority of time I only have 2-4 apps open: terminal/IDE, browser, music player and some IM. Floating windows seems like a waste of space. Browser is full-screen on any regular proportion screen (i.e. not ultra-wide).
I rarely use floating windows, even on windowed-WMs.
I’m sure there’s differences in workflow styles. I tend to have multiple tasks in flight at any given moment and switch between them often enough that closing+opening sets of apps and windows represents showstopping overhead, so lots of things just sit open. Floating windows on mutliple desktops with dual monitors suits this style well.
It’s worth noting that I don’t spend large amounts of time in terminals and text editors, but instead in graphical apps and chrome-heavy IDEs which are awkward in tiling setups because of how much screen space they demand. If I were more terminal-heavy I’m sure tiling would make more sense.
I work on multiple tasks too, it's just all of it is done is either in a browser tab or terminal tab. Usually those live in separate virtual screens, but one of my machines has an ultrawide, so I can comfortably put 2-3 tiles on it depending on what I'm working on.
Tiling is all about efficient use of space (and wasting all gains by adding cool looking gaps to post on UnixPorn). I find floating windows just hard to navigate and wasteful when 99% of time I want the app to be in a full-screen. Hence why macOS splits get me pretty much where I want to be.
What I really want, but don't have the technical skill to write unfortunately:), is a window manager or compositor that lets me set the size of a window and the viewport into that window independently. That is, formalize the approach that yes this window is rendering as if it was taking up half the screen but I only need to actually see this tiny slice of it, so just give me a window that shows that piece
This should be possible on X11 using standard extensions. XCompositeRedirectWindow to render your window to a virtual buffer, get pixmap, bind pixmap to new croppedWindow as a GL texture, here apply a crop transform. Then optionally unmap original window. Finally, we have to remap input events. This is trivial browser-style event interception, XSelectInput, change x,y, XSendEvent. I can try to make it work sometime this week. A CLI tool you'd use like `xcropwindow windowID x y dx dy`. As a side effect, this way you can have multiple viewports into different parts of a window. But there's probably a few deal-breaker edge cases I'm missing.
On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
>On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
I really tried switching over to sway / wayland a couple years back, but there were just so. many. things. which, despite wayland being 'the future' and 'ready for prime time' among proponents just bugged the heck out of me.
Why is it an act of congress to setup screen sharing / recording. Like sure it works for this one fork of OBS but if I'm trying to set up a telehealth session with my doctor all of a sudden I can't share my screen? Or global hotkeys don't work? I can't easily redshift my monitor at night? Pulse audio is jank for some unknown reason (Idk if this was even related)
It was just death by a thousand cuts. When it really came down to it, wayland added nothing but headaches to my life without any discernible benefit. None of it's 'selling points' meant anything to me.
Then suddenly I remembered I'm no longer the early adopter / OSS enthusiast I was in my youth. I'm now a grumpy grey beard who just wants things to work. I installed pop 22 with gnome on xorg and went on with my life. I think it's pretty telling that cosmic was released in alpha this time last year and it's still there today. While I realize that writing a DE is a big undertaking, they were basically trying for a fresh rewrite of gnome's UI in rust under wayland. No way it would have taken this long if they were targeting x.
Thing have come so far in the past couple years that I'm not sure anything you mentioned is even a problem anymore. Global hotkeys work, pulse audio just works, screen sharing just works, redshifting is no issue?
No one cares that I can go and register global hotkeys in the compositor config file. The whole point is that apps do it themselves. If you still want a security theater, then add a prompt or what macos has where you go give it permissions.
If you see the global hotkeys section. It still has a lot of caveats. Bonus: see what's needed for push to talk to work...
The benchmark before wayland becomes default is:
Do OBS start recording shortcuts work.
And does discord push to talk work.
Today on KDE and GNOME the answer is no.
Any distro/DE that pushes wayland as a default without the answer to both of these questions being yes is pure cancer.
For anyone interested, there is a dbus API to register shortcuts that I believe KDE supports, gnome does only since the last 6 months, and hyprland/sway don't, and likely won't. Obviously, app developers aren't going to use it with such fragmented support.
> On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
I'm pretty sure it's doable, but it probably does need to be baked into the compositor. But since there are compositors that can do full immersive 3D environments with windows moving around in them, I can't believe that there's any manipulation of the contents of a window that you can't do in Wayland.
Of course, being able to add it as tiny helper program is probably something that's going to be specific to X11, or possibly (best case) require non-portable APIs that are specific to individual compositors in Wayland.
Yeah of course the compositor can do anything, but that's completely useless. Community applications need to be able to do it. Such applications are easily the most popular productivity applications on every other OS. If they're oh-so-concerned about security, a featureful accessibility API like the one macos has is table stakes, and needs to be developed before anything else. Its disgusting to release half baked theater like wayland does. </rant>
I sometimes do this as well. Most tiling wms do support overlapping windows thouhg it isn't the default. But then many regular window managers will support placement of windows in various splits manually with a keypress or two so in reality the wins for tiling wms are very small in normal use. I think you have to have a crazy rate of opening and closing windows to benefit from automatic tiling which doesn't fit with my actual usage outside the terminal where I use a terminal specific tiling.
Several times I have tried to move to scrolling as I like it a lot more than tiling.
My only problem with tiling is that I usually have 2-3 apps tiled that are stable and a “gap” where I quickly pop things I only need momentarily (slack, an extra terminal, postman, whatever). I never managed that quick readjustment in tiling managers, maybe it was just lack of practice.
Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.
I don't think you're in the minority (I also prefer floating windows), it's just that as the default style of window management there's not much to say on the topic. So people don't bother.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't know when we'll literally get "The Year of Linux on the Desktop"
Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this:
> Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea.
My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one.
I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.
There's also Omikub or any of the other "user friendly" distros.
Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay.
There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing.
>she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one
Interesting and disappointing. When I googled the difference between the two versions I only came up with the fact that one supported disk encryption (which I didn't really feel was necessary for a desktop)
I would have loved a stripped down install of windows without all the bloat, but the only option I knew of was the LTSC version which is supposedly janky for gaming
I've actually searched quite a bit on how to disable it and can't find anything (partially because there aren't great search terms for it), if you've got a clue I would love to hear it but I assure you it is not obvious.
It's the idea that most people don't actually know what they want, at least not at first.
Several pages after:
Making a choice #
I built Omakub when I first switched to Linux. I ran it as my daily driver for over a year. It's an excellent choice for anyone making the switch from Windows or Mac for the first time.
But today I run Omarchy. It's not as familiar, it's more of an acquired taste, but boy, when you acquire the taste for tiling window managers, it's hard to go back to using the mouse to drag windows around. The whole system just flows through your fingertips!
When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful.
Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.
It's worth noting that some of it may be inspired by some of the spats he's had with Apple over the years that aren't really related to their desktop operating system. A couple that come to mind is the fact that his wife wasn't approved for an Apple credit card, and the difficulty he had in getting the Hey app approved in the App Store. (Of course, it could be that once Apple lost its "shine" for him he became more critical of other products in a way that tribe-members won't)
I don't know DHH personally, but seeing what he did by introducing ruby on rails, plus listening to his thoughts via the rework podcast, also reading about his company's move away from the hyperscaler cloud providers, and now both the omakube and omarchy offerings...yeah, we need more folks (with his kind of fame of sorts) to help others as well.
I just watched the Rails 8 presentation, and was tremendously impressed. It made me wish I was a Rails dev. The philosophy of a framework designed for a lone developer to deploy extremely quickly is very cool.
Somehow, DHH has tapped into an enthusiasm for Linux I haven't felt in a long time. It's so great to see and to experience it with him! When I first discovered Linux it started a journey, from wonder to pragmatism (Mandrake [2004] -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS [current]).
I also spend many nights tweaking and re-tweaking, compiling kernels to get the maximum out of my desktops on rotating cubes with reflections and fish inside, the early Beryl/Xgl days. I miss those days, but Linux is a tool now, sometimes even just a runtime! Still have it on any computer though, and it just works, it feels like home!
From that late 2.4 kernel, manually mounting the first USB drives to what we have now. Super slick and smooth desktops, COW files systems, the ability to run almost any software. I love Linux.
(RedHat[Office Max] -> Yellow Dog -> Gentoo -> Arch).
Moved from Gentoo to Arch because I was tired of compiling system updates. Was fun compiling when tweaking the kernel and compiler settings trying to maximize Doom 3 on Linux. Enemy Territory didn't need any tweaking.
I don't mind new or more distros. Helps learn new ways of doing things to make Linux more presentable to others. Tools still needs to be presentable to the masses.
Hehe, I forgot to put Gentoo in there haha, for me Arch also felt like binary (and thus much faster to install!) Gentoo!
I love new distro's, especially paradigm shifting ones. Ubuntu at the time ("It just works"), Gentoo ("squeeze max performance out of my hardware and know it thoroughly") Arch ("So fresh, unmatched package availability through AUR"), NixOS ("My OS lives in Git, and that is where it is supposed to be") and the new Fedora silverblue/bootc stuff ("Get some of those cloud paradigms on my personal devices"). Although I haven't played with the latter, mostly because the advantages are NixOS like, and NixOS does it well, and I'm not done learning by a long shot, but it deserves some checking out, it's certainly a new paradigm.
Nix is hard to get into. The lang is weird, and I'm a functional programmer. It's not very well documented. Flakes just don't seem to be documented at all? But are used everywhere?
It's just a dude that fell in love with an OS, let him enjoy it. Many people went through this phase, except he is very influential and high energy, so we hear a lot about his particular honeymoon. I for one am really enjoying his journey. Reminds me of myself when I first discovered Linux. I don't evangelize anymore, I helped to many people onto Linux only to have to watch them completely hate it, it's too painful ;)
Sure, a nice configuration.nix to try Ohmanix would be great, and much more convenient, easier to maintain and evolve than DHH's scripts. But that is not the point. Maybe he will try NixOS in a year, maybe he will land on some bootc distro. I don't care, I love his enthusiasm. Btw, on the Linux Unplugged podcast the hosts are following DHH closely and indeed experimenting with more modern ways of creating similar experiences. Partly fueled just by DHH's enthusiasm.
Hyprland was a bit too far from what I'm used to, and required too many changes in my workflow, but all of this DHH pushing convinced me to try out Linux on a day to day basis and I'm switching to Fedora/Gnome so that's still a win for the cause I'd say.
I've been using Linux on and off since 2005. I've mostly stuck with Ubuntu after briefly using Slackware, but found myself using Windows like 95% of the time in the last few years.
Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers.
I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.
Hyprland is delightful, and the exposure DHH is giving both to it, Arch, and Linux is great.
Since Hyprland is composable and customizable by design, building out a functional workspace from scratch is an undertaking. On the other hand, there are number of other pre-configured dot-file "spins" worth trying that produce a nice Hyprland setup.
I like Omarchy, but ultimately settled on a Cachyos + Hyprland setup using Ml4W dotfiles. Like Omarchy, ML4W builds a very nice setup that isn't too garish and with sensible defaults. However, I benefit from Cachyos kernel optimizations and I'll admit I've become a convert to Fish. (Omarchy is the only Hyprland spin I've seen that keeps to Bash as the default interactive shell for Kitty/Alacritty.)
As I do like keeping up with Omarchy's evolution, it would be great if DHH could separate the Hyprland stuff from the rest of what he packages into his quasi-distro and make it available to folks who already have an Arch or Arch-derived setup they like. Personally, I'd like to revisit Omarchy from time to time without having to install another OS (Hyprland doesn't work well with VMs.)
The thing with ML4W is that by screenshots it looks like any other desktop environment with overlapping mess of differently sized windows. While Omarchy pushes the tiling manager aspect.
It's not. It's 100% tiling by default and functions the same way as Omarchy's spin. However, the developer did make a couple of setting app GUIs that are pop-up focused. I think the screenshots emphasize those, which makes it look less tiling than it is.
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively since around 2005 when they sent you CD-ROMs (remember those?). I've been trying to switch to Arch for about 5 years now. Not because Ubuntu was broken, but because I wanted something new. I sometimes install it on an old laptop, marvel at the perceived speed increase of that old(er) machine, tell myself I'll switch tomorrow when I can find a spare day for it, and 5 years later it still didn't happen. My older laptop now runs Omarchy. And it's great and all, but I still don't think it will happen. My next laptop, for sure, will switch to Arch. Possibly. Maybe.
DHH is the creator of Ruby On Rails. He is also a rich opinionated high energy asshole (so your average Apple fanboi). Those thumbnails are videos that explain and show the workflow of his desktop.
Seems a bit reductive when the post is literally him pushing Arch Linux and he's also been hyping Framework and talking about his Apple departure for quite a while now.
But also for GP, there's literally an "About DHH" section at the bottom of the pretty short post you're commenting on.
For mac users interested in tiling (ish) managers, but not willing to make the leap DHH made, I highly recommend the Magnet app, which gets me most of the goodness he is demoing in the first part here ... (and maybe a little more?)
Aerospace is great, but macos is not, and unfortunately, there are enough immutable things (given the discussions in the GH issues around them in the Aerospace repo) about macos' walled garden/closed approach that annoyed me/got in my way enough after a few weeks of using it that I have concluded (for myself/my purposes at least) that macos is not tiling/custom WM workable now or in the forseeable future.
How Aerospace (and others) degrade under heavier system load, etc (again, not b/c they are poorly written, but b/c macos inherently does not want these kinds of packages to even exist and makes things very hard to say the least, if not impossible, requiring some very awkward gymnastics) made this incredibly frustrating at the worst possible times.
Yes. Hyprland has burnt bridges with many of the classic/pre-existing Linux dev communities. Amongst other things, the main developer was banned from freedesktop.
But they have a very, very large user base, which means lots of contributors - especially young, first-time-FOSS/Linux contributors. In a way, Hyprland has partially done what Linus was hoping to do by adding Rust to the kernel (attract the next-generation of young developers). And they have an active BDFL - no "led by committee" issues.
i don’t care, hyprland is great software and much better than whatever the ‘non-toxic as labeled by drew devault’ communities have come up with for WMs
I don't think despised is correct. Drew made an argument for more mature and responsible behavior and leadership but some people just want to write code and not manage a community. I think that can be a lot to expect from some young programer thrown into the public eye, Hyprland is a well regarded implementation amongst tiling wms but the category always has and in my opinion always will have limited appeal for good reason.
The linux developer community has quite a diverse set of opinions so it would be unfair to say that they despise hyprland. At most it's just a small number of developers who hold such an extreme position.
Drew Devault is a left wing nutjob. He's done nothing but cause drama and attack people for years now.
Vaxry is an immature ~20 year old Polish dude. That means a bit of angst, Eastern European humour, more conservative opinions than most US tech workers.
Yeah, Vaxry is considered abrasive to some of the ultra-privileged leftwing US tech sphere. Most people don't care, just as people don't care about DD's views when using Sway, Miguel de Icaza's views when using Gnome, etc...
No hate, but I don't really feel like Arch + opinionated dotfiles is really in the same space as NixOS. If someone found setting up Hyprland or just installing Arch and some packages to be overly difficult, I can't imagine what they'd think of Nix.
Nix is not competition. Nix is not attracting thousands and thousands of new, young Linux users and potential future contributors like Arch+Hyprland are.
Nix seems really cool, and I'd like to explore it. I'm spending more time with OpenBSD right now as that approach just seems simpler. I use Artix and hyprland at home though. It's a better desktop experience, I think. The only reason I'd use OpenBSD or NixOS in the desktop would be to try and learn it more so I was more comfortable in deployment.
They serve completely different purposes and are not mutually exclusive. The main takeaways from the ublue stuff is how they build immutable OS images and focus on container-based development workflows. Omarchy is all about ergonomic desktop configuration. They are both cool projects.
You could easily replicate the container-based development workflows on Omarchy with distrobox even if you won't be using an immutable OS image. With more effort, you could replicate the Omarchy desktop configuration on a ublue image. Someone already ported Omarchy to nixos. I think we will continue to see a lot going on with immutable, reproducible operating systems and Omarchy will kickstart some cool stuff with desktop configuration.
Bluefin looks super interesting! But I'm personally on a "less cloud everywhere" kick. I'm running OpenBSD as a hobby machine because I want to get better at real UNIX administration, which seems like a lost art. So my gut feeling looking at bluefin is that separating the OS layer and the dev layer gets me farther away from bare metal, not closer, which is not what I want right now. But I'm totally open to the idea that it could offer a better experience, it's just that getting farther away from the core OS is not what I'm looking for right now.
That's why I really appreciate what DHH is doing both for desktop Linux and with Linux server deployment. I think there's a pretty comprehensive worldview in advocating for both of those technologies. Not sure if that makes me a cult member or what
This article is from June 26th.
The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth.
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Here is the updated Omarchy Manual to get a good feel for things: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual
I've been seeing a lot of people setting it up on old macbook pros.. and think I'll do the same
<offtopic> Minor website feedback:
Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep.
Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
I suspect it's a Hey-wide thing.
But if you trim off the `?disposition=attachment` from the URL, it loads in the browser. At least for me in Firefox.
Ah... that makes sense. I hadn't heard of Hey before but it appears Hey World is a pretty newly added feature to a platform primarily built for & around email - attachments do make some deal of sense in that context, though I'd imagine I might still like to browse image attachments in my email client from time to time rather than stash them in downloads.
Might just be teething issues for a new product though.
I might be in the minority but I actually like overlapping windows - often the entire window is not necessary to get the data I am interested in. Right now I'm running tests in another window and I have a sliver of that window visible while the majority of the screen real-estate gets used for the browser in primary window.
I'm beginning to really like scrolling window managers.
It's optimized for minimal splits (let's say 2-3 windows) per view but it makes it effortless to flip between apps. Floating windows is also an option and making any of them full screen is available too.
Imagine tiling a bunch of pieces of paper on your floor and now you want to focus on a few of them at a time. That's basically what a scrolling window manager allows, you can either swipe on a touchpad, hit the arrow keys or use your mouse wheel to cycle between stuff. Of course you can customize these, that's just a reasonable default.
It's so much faster than manually dealing with workspaces IMO.
I'm currently taking a look into both Hyprland's scrolling plugins and if that fails then Niri. I wish Hyprland's official scrolling plugin was not in an alpha state. I want to stick with Hyprland because everything else about it is really nice.
All of this stuff works independent of Omarchy too since it's 100% related to your window manager.
Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/r0JUm77inIA?t=319
[Note: I'm not the author of the video but I jumped to a timestamp where he's showing Niri's scrolling features]
Happy niri user checking in. Hard to imagine going back to a non-scrolling wm. Niri also has a decent config and builtins like screenshotting too.
Indeed, although I find hyprshot + satty a pretty good combo. It's almost as good as Flameshot.
I think it's really important to be able to take a region, specific window or full display screenshot with an ability to annotate afterwards and then also have an option to save to disk or copy to clipboard depending on what you want to do for that screenshot.
Flameshot was ideal because it lets you adjust the region size while also having the annotation controls at the same time. All of these other solutions don't let you adjust the region during annotation time since you're piping the image data into a different annotation tool.
I recently switched to niri from sway. I do like it ... There's something nice and spatial about it that makes keeping track of what's where really easy.
Yep. It keeps getting better. I was recently in the market for a new laptop, and Niri is partly why I didn’t buy a MacBook. It’s hard for me to imagine going back to osx.
I recall being able to set FVWM2 desktop size larger than the screen size. Some people went really large with this, but I found it way too easy to lose track of windows. I’m curious as to how these new window managers are different.
FYI: The author of Hyprland's scrolling plugin (not the official one) had archived it and instead forked sway to create scroll.
https://github.com/dawsers/scroll https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller
Definitely makes logical sense.
I'm not a big fan of "workspaces" but I do love tiling WM with multiple screens.
My desktop at home is Ubuntu + i3 but I keep experimenting on my laptop with different WM. It's currently running Regolith but I'm probably going to try Omarchy 2.0...2.1 maybe? Let it simmer a little.
I saw a scrolling WM video recently and _loved_ what I saw, just too busy to set it up right now. Lots of potential there.
That sounds like exactly what I've wanted - Sort of like those blackboards / whiteboards that you can roll around.
What's your favorite? Right now I'm on xfce and KDE as my daily drivers but I'll shop around next time I wanna shake things up
> Sort of like those blackboards / whiteboards that you can roll around.
Yes exactly. Since I was a kid, I always envisioned a future world where all of my walls were a monitor and I could just move across them as needed to focus on things. A scrolling manager isn't quite that but it's in the right direction.
I don't like switching between full screen windows because mentally it's so much easier (IMO) to keep things in context when I see all the important things at once. I want to see my code, the terminal output, search results and the docs in 1 view but when I don't care about the search results and docs I want to quickly throw them off to the side, but still have them available if needed on demand.
Situational splitting with scrolling allows for the above without the cognitive load of hitting a million hotkeys to move things to workspaces and balance your splits.
I've always felt like with traditional tiled window managers you're trading 1 problem for another. Instead of meddling with every floated window's size and position you're meddling with split sizes and workspace management.
> What's your favorite?
It's too soon to say as I've only recently discovered them. I do think Niri and Hyprland with https://github.com/cpiber/hyprscroller or https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins are places to start. Niri has scrolling as a first class feature. The first Hyprland link is a fork of a deprecated plugin and the 2nd link is an official new plugin but it's super bare bones and a big WIP.
The hyprscroller author made a fork of sway called scroll: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll
I quite like it!
You can try Karousel on KDE.
Earlier concepts existed but it all exploded with PaperWM on Gnome.
There is niri, scroll(sway), papersway, hyprland's plugins, PaperWM, PaperWM.spoon on Mac, Komorebi on Windows etc
(CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.
Same here, multiple monitors, overlapping windows has never worked for me. I don't need big monitors for the same reason. I also make sure to keep the number of things I have open to a minimum. Then simply tabbing or using a tiling manager like i3 (without using actual tiling) (they are just faster than running full desktops). It also means I can be productive with any setup anywhere e.g. a laptop
I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you.
Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.
I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.
I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.
In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
Using SUPER+F for toggling fullscreen and SUPER+TAB to switch workspaces is basically the same workflow - it's just so much easier to customize Hyprland to be the exact way you want and Omarchy is a wonderful foundation for it. I found it had much better defaults and more intuitive customization than the Hyprland Hyprperks setup https://account.hypr.land/pricing
>Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland
Just tried it, worked without issue using Proton-GE https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
I have all my windows centered but pyramid stacked. I can see a bit of everything but my main browser is in the center. Slack is in the upper right, and the browser leaves a bit of the Slack screen open. I keep Obsidian in the lower left such that I can see the organization panel.. it helps me keep a mental map of the notes I'm working with.
In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.
I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.
When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.
Corner case all the way.
You’re not alone. I can’t make full-time tiling or even tiling-dominant work for me. With how my mind works, full floating 98% of the time with the occasional tile is the right blend. I tile so infrequently that tiling being keybound has net zero impact.
Majority of time I only have 2-4 apps open: terminal/IDE, browser, music player and some IM. Floating windows seems like a waste of space. Browser is full-screen on any regular proportion screen (i.e. not ultra-wide).
I rarely use floating windows, even on windowed-WMs.
I’m sure there’s differences in workflow styles. I tend to have multiple tasks in flight at any given moment and switch between them often enough that closing+opening sets of apps and windows represents showstopping overhead, so lots of things just sit open. Floating windows on mutliple desktops with dual monitors suits this style well.
It’s worth noting that I don’t spend large amounts of time in terminals and text editors, but instead in graphical apps and chrome-heavy IDEs which are awkward in tiling setups because of how much screen space they demand. If I were more terminal-heavy I’m sure tiling would make more sense.
I work on multiple tasks too, it's just all of it is done is either in a browser tab or terminal tab. Usually those live in separate virtual screens, but one of my machines has an ultrawide, so I can comfortably put 2-3 tiles on it depending on what I'm working on.
Tiling is all about efficient use of space (and wasting all gains by adding cool looking gaps to post on UnixPorn). I find floating windows just hard to navigate and wasteful when 99% of time I want the app to be in a full-screen. Hence why macOS splits get me pretty much where I want to be.
What I really want, but don't have the technical skill to write unfortunately:), is a window manager or compositor that lets me set the size of a window and the viewport into that window independently. That is, formalize the approach that yes this window is rendering as if it was taking up half the screen but I only need to actually see this tiny slice of it, so just give me a window that shows that piece
This should be possible on X11 using standard extensions. XCompositeRedirectWindow to render your window to a virtual buffer, get pixmap, bind pixmap to new croppedWindow as a GL texture, here apply a crop transform. Then optionally unmap original window. Finally, we have to remap input events. This is trivial browser-style event interception, XSelectInput, change x,y, XSendEvent. I can try to make it work sometime this week. A CLI tool you'd use like `xcropwindow windowID x y dx dy`. As a side effect, this way you can have multiple viewports into different parts of a window. But there's probably a few deal-breaker edge cases I'm missing.
On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
>On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
I really tried switching over to sway / wayland a couple years back, but there were just so. many. things. which, despite wayland being 'the future' and 'ready for prime time' among proponents just bugged the heck out of me.
Why is it an act of congress to setup screen sharing / recording. Like sure it works for this one fork of OBS but if I'm trying to set up a telehealth session with my doctor all of a sudden I can't share my screen? Or global hotkeys don't work? I can't easily redshift my monitor at night? Pulse audio is jank for some unknown reason (Idk if this was even related)
It was just death by a thousand cuts. When it really came down to it, wayland added nothing but headaches to my life without any discernible benefit. None of it's 'selling points' meant anything to me.
Then suddenly I remembered I'm no longer the early adopter / OSS enthusiast I was in my youth. I'm now a grumpy grey beard who just wants things to work. I installed pop 22 with gnome on xorg and went on with my life. I think it's pretty telling that cosmic was released in alpha this time last year and it's still there today. While I realize that writing a DE is a big undertaking, they were basically trying for a fresh rewrite of gnome's UI in rust under wayland. No way it would have taken this long if they were targeting x.
Thing have come so far in the past couple years that I'm not sure anything you mentioned is even a problem anymore. Global hotkeys work, pulse audio just works, screen sharing just works, redshifting is no issue?
https://wiki.hypr.land/Configuring/Binds/#global-keybinds
https://wiki.hypr.land/Hypr-Ecosystem/hyprsunset/
https://wiki.hypr.land/Useful-Utilities/Screen-Sharing/
> Hotkeys
Bullshit.
No one cares that I can go and register global hotkeys in the compositor config file. The whole point is that apps do it themselves. If you still want a security theater, then add a prompt or what macos has where you go give it permissions.
https://wearewaylandnow.com/
If you see the global hotkeys section. It still has a lot of caveats. Bonus: see what's needed for push to talk to work...
The benchmark before wayland becomes default is:
Do OBS start recording shortcuts work.
And does discord push to talk work.
Today on KDE and GNOME the answer is no.
Any distro/DE that pushes wayland as a default without the answer to both of these questions being yes is pure cancer.
For anyone interested, there is a dbus API to register shortcuts that I believe KDE supports, gnome does only since the last 6 months, and hyprland/sway don't, and likely won't. Obviously, app developers aren't going to use it with such fragmented support.
Further reading(2024): https://dec05eba.com/2024/03/29/wayland-global-hotkeys-short...
> On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
I'm pretty sure it's doable, but it probably does need to be baked into the compositor. But since there are compositors that can do full immersive 3D environments with windows moving around in them, I can't believe that there's any manipulation of the contents of a window that you can't do in Wayland.
Of course, being able to add it as tiny helper program is probably something that's going to be specific to X11, or possibly (best case) require non-portable APIs that are specific to individual compositors in Wayland.
Yeah of course the compositor can do anything, but that's completely useless. Community applications need to be able to do it. Such applications are easily the most popular productivity applications on every other OS. If they're oh-so-concerned about security, a featureful accessibility API like the one macos has is table stakes, and needs to be developed before anything else. Its disgusting to release half baked theater like wayland does. </rant>
Do you mean something like this?
https://github.com/dawsers/scroll?tab=readme-ov-file#content...
I sometimes do this as well. Most tiling wms do support overlapping windows thouhg it isn't the default. But then many regular window managers will support placement of windows in various splits manually with a keypress or two so in reality the wins for tiling wms are very small in normal use. I think you have to have a crazy rate of opening and closing windows to benefit from automatic tiling which doesn't fit with my actual usage outside the terminal where I use a terminal specific tiling.
Several times I have tried to move to scrolling as I like it a lot more than tiling.
My only problem with tiling is that I usually have 2-3 apps tiled that are stable and a “gap” where I quickly pop things I only need momentarily (slack, an extra terminal, postman, whatever). I never managed that quick readjustment in tiling managers, maybe it was just lack of practice.
Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.
I don't think you're in the minority (I also prefer floating windows), it's just that as the default style of window management there's not much to say on the topic. So people don't bother.
That's just the Macbrain you have because macos didn't have any window management for long time.
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.
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.
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"
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?
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.
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:
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:
[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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't know when we'll literally get "The Year of Linux on the Desktop"
Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this:
> Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea.
My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one.
I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.
There's also Omikub or any of the other "user friendly" distros.
Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay.
There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing.
Steam goes a long way too
My 76-year old mother finds it much easier to use Zorin out the box than her Windows 11 machine.
>she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one
Interesting and disappointing. When I googled the difference between the two versions I only came up with the fact that one supported disk encryption (which I didn't really feel was necessary for a desktop)
I would have loved a stripped down install of windows without all the bloat, but the only option I knew of was the LTSC version which is supposedly janky for gaming
There's over a dozen posts about this, most recent one from 19 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811905
It's making the rounds again because it just hit 2.0.
I want to love Omarchy but replacing the boot splash screen with its logo is rough, I wish there was a clear way to disable that
You can. You can either change the logo or disable the splash screen altogether by removing a kernel parameter.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth
Thanks for the tip, "Plymouth" was the keyword I was missing here
That's a deal breaker for you?
Yeah, it's like, embarrassing. I don't want other people seeing that screen pop up
The whole point of omarchy is to give you great defaults, and then it being linux everything is completely customizable.
Which with ChatGpt/Grok is trivial these days for even a non linux native.
I've actually searched quite a bit on how to disable it and can't find anything (partially because there aren't great search terms for it), if you've got a clue I would love to hear it but I assure you it is not obvious.
Calling many of Omarchys defaults great is a stretch.
It's not about Omarchy, it's about an influencer falling in love with Linux. You can also fall in love, and shape the OS to your own liking.
First page explaining Omacom:
It's the idea that most people don't actually know what they want, at least not at first.
Several pages after:
Making a choice # I built Omakub when I first switched to Linux. I ran it as my daily driver for over a year. It's an excellent choice for anyone making the switch from Windows or Mac for the first time. But today I run Omarchy. It's not as familiar, it's more of an acquired taste, but boy, when you acquire the taste for tiling window managers, it's hard to go back to using the mouse to drag windows around. The whole system just flows through your fingertips!
Why? You just killed the whole omakase concept
The world needs people like DHH.
When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful.
Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.
It's worth noting that some of it may be inspired by some of the spats he's had with Apple over the years that aren't really related to their desktop operating system. A couple that come to mind is the fact that his wife wasn't approved for an Apple credit card, and the difficulty he had in getting the Hey app approved in the App Store. (Of course, it could be that once Apple lost its "shine" for him he became more critical of other products in a way that tribe-members won't)
I don't know DHH personally, but seeing what he did by introducing ruby on rails, plus listening to his thoughts via the rework podcast, also reading about his company's move away from the hyperscaler cloud providers, and now both the omakube and omarchy offerings...yeah, we need more folks (with his kind of fame of sorts) to help others as well.
I just watched the Rails 8 presentation, and was tremendously impressed. It made me wish I was a Rails dev. The philosophy of a framework designed for a lone developer to deploy extremely quickly is very cool.
I like DHH because I like his taste. However there are lots of people like him.
However he seems to have the ability to build movements, and I don't know why.
Somehow, DHH has tapped into an enthusiasm for Linux I haven't felt in a long time. It's so great to see and to experience it with him! When I first discovered Linux it started a journey, from wonder to pragmatism (Mandrake [2004] -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS [current]).
I also spend many nights tweaking and re-tweaking, compiling kernels to get the maximum out of my desktops on rotating cubes with reflections and fish inside, the early Beryl/Xgl days. I miss those days, but Linux is a tool now, sometimes even just a runtime! Still have it on any computer though, and it just works, it feels like home!
From that late 2.4 kernel, manually mounting the first USB drives to what we have now. Super slick and smooth desktops, COW files systems, the ability to run almost any software. I love Linux.
(RedHat[Office Max] -> Yellow Dog -> Gentoo -> Arch).
Moved from Gentoo to Arch because I was tired of compiling system updates. Was fun compiling when tweaking the kernel and compiler settings trying to maximize Doom 3 on Linux. Enemy Territory didn't need any tweaking.
I don't mind new or more distros. Helps learn new ways of doing things to make Linux more presentable to others. Tools still needs to be presentable to the masses.
Hehe, I forgot to put Gentoo in there haha, for me Arch also felt like binary (and thus much faster to install!) Gentoo!
I love new distro's, especially paradigm shifting ones. Ubuntu at the time ("It just works"), Gentoo ("squeeze max performance out of my hardware and know it thoroughly") Arch ("So fresh, unmatched package availability through AUR"), NixOS ("My OS lives in Git, and that is where it is supposed to be") and the new Fedora silverblue/bootc stuff ("Get some of those cloud paradigms on my personal devices"). Although I haven't played with the latter, mostly because the advantages are NixOS like, and NixOS does it well, and I'm not done learning by a long shot, but it deserves some checking out, it's certainly a new paradigm.
I genuinely don't understand this. It seems obtuse for the take of being obtuse with no real payoff. NixOS solves this problem comprehensively.
Nix is hard to get into. The lang is weird, and I'm a functional programmer. It's not very well documented. Flakes just don't seem to be documented at all? But are used everywhere?
It's just a dude that fell in love with an OS, let him enjoy it. Many people went through this phase, except he is very influential and high energy, so we hear a lot about his particular honeymoon. I for one am really enjoying his journey. Reminds me of myself when I first discovered Linux. I don't evangelize anymore, I helped to many people onto Linux only to have to watch them completely hate it, it's too painful ;)
Sure, a nice configuration.nix to try Ohmanix would be great, and much more convenient, easier to maintain and evolve than DHH's scripts. But that is not the point. Maybe he will try NixOS in a year, maybe he will land on some bootc distro. I don't care, I love his enthusiasm. Btw, on the Linux Unplugged podcast the hosts are following DHH closely and indeed experimenting with more modern ways of creating similar experiences. Partly fueled just by DHH's enthusiasm.
Hyprland was a bit too far from what I'm used to, and required too many changes in my workflow, but all of this DHH pushing convinced me to try out Linux on a day to day basis and I'm switching to Fedora/Gnome so that's still a win for the cause I'd say.
I've been using Linux on and off since 2005. I've mostly stuck with Ubuntu after briefly using Slackware, but found myself using Windows like 95% of the time in the last few years.
Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers.
I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.
Hyprland is delightful, and the exposure DHH is giving both to it, Arch, and Linux is great.
Since Hyprland is composable and customizable by design, building out a functional workspace from scratch is an undertaking. On the other hand, there are number of other pre-configured dot-file "spins" worth trying that produce a nice Hyprland setup.
I like Omarchy, but ultimately settled on a Cachyos + Hyprland setup using Ml4W dotfiles. Like Omarchy, ML4W builds a very nice setup that isn't too garish and with sensible defaults. However, I benefit from Cachyos kernel optimizations and I'll admit I've become a convert to Fish. (Omarchy is the only Hyprland spin I've seen that keeps to Bash as the default interactive shell for Kitty/Alacritty.)
As I do like keeping up with Omarchy's evolution, it would be great if DHH could separate the Hyprland stuff from the rest of what he packages into his quasi-distro and make it available to folks who already have an Arch or Arch-derived setup they like. Personally, I'd like to revisit Omarchy from time to time without having to install another OS (Hyprland doesn't work well with VMs.)
The thing with ML4W is that by screenshots it looks like any other desktop environment with overlapping mess of differently sized windows. While Omarchy pushes the tiling manager aspect.
It's not. It's 100% tiling by default and functions the same way as Omarchy's spin. However, the developer did make a couple of setting app GUIs that are pop-up focused. I think the screenshots emphasize those, which makes it look less tiling than it is.
TIL that the "Super" key is the "Windows" key.
Sadly, no "Hyper" key from yesteryear yet.
https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
tried omargchy, went back to vanilla hyprland
Anyone know how to change the mouse acceleration to something that feels like Mac? It feels really bad.
This might help: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/78/keyboard-mou...
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively since around 2005 when they sent you CD-ROMs (remember those?). I've been trying to switch to Arch for about 5 years now. Not because Ubuntu was broken, but because I wanted something new. I sometimes install it on an old laptop, marvel at the perceived speed increase of that old(er) machine, tell myself I'll switch tomorrow when I can find a spare day for it, and 5 years later it still didn't happen. My older laptop now runs Omarchy. And it's great and all, but I still don't think it will happen. My next laptop, for sure, will switch to Arch. Possibly. Maybe.
I feel like I'm missing some context here. Who is DHH and why is his desktop so desirable?
The main page says it's "opinionated" and has two thumbnails of desktops that are mostly just a background image.
DHH is the creator of Ruby On Rails. He is also a rich opinionated high energy asshole (so your average Apple fanboi). Those thumbnails are videos that explain and show the workflow of his desktop.
Seems a bit reductive when the post is literally him pushing Arch Linux and he's also been hyping Framework and talking about his Apple departure for quite a while now.
But also for GP, there's literally an "About DHH" section at the bottom of the pretty short post you're commenting on.
For mac users interested in tiling (ish) managers, but not willing to make the leap DHH made, I highly recommend the Magnet app, which gets me most of the goodness he is demoing in the first part here ... (and maybe a little more?)
Free version of Rectangle is very good https://rectangleapp.com/
The only tiling window experience that stuck for me is Aerospace.
I would also like to recommend Aerospace which is closer to i3 on Linux:
https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
Aerospace is great, but macos is not, and unfortunately, there are enough immutable things (given the discussions in the GH issues around them in the Aerospace repo) about macos' walled garden/closed approach that annoyed me/got in my way enough after a few weeks of using it that I have concluded (for myself/my purposes at least) that macos is not tiling/custom WM workable now or in the forseeable future.
How Aerospace (and others) degrade under heavier system load, etc (again, not b/c they are poorly written, but b/c macos inherently does not want these kinds of packages to even exist and makes things very hard to say the least, if not impossible, requiring some very awkward gymnastics) made this incredibly frustrating at the worst possible times.
wow looks nice, will try ;)
Last time I checked hyprland was pretty much despised in the wider linux developer community. See for example https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html. Has anything about that changed?
Yes. Hyprland has burnt bridges with many of the classic/pre-existing Linux dev communities. Amongst other things, the main developer was banned from freedesktop.
But they have a very, very large user base, which means lots of contributors - especially young, first-time-FOSS/Linux contributors. In a way, Hyprland has partially done what Linus was hoping to do by adding Rust to the kernel (attract the next-generation of young developers). And they have an active BDFL - no "led by committee" issues.
the linux developer community is not a monolith and drew devault is an extremist activist gatekeeper.
i don’t care, hyprland is great software and much better than whatever the ‘non-toxic as labeled by drew devault’ communities have come up with for WMs
Nah it's just the people who don't like them are really loud.
I don't think despised is correct. Drew made an argument for more mature and responsible behavior and leadership but some people just want to write code and not manage a community. I think that can be a lot to expect from some young programer thrown into the public eye, Hyprland is a well regarded implementation amongst tiling wms but the category always has and in my opinion always will have limited appeal for good reason.
The linux developer community has quite a diverse set of opinions so it would be unfair to say that they despise hyprland. At most it's just a small number of developers who hold such an extreme position.
Drew Devault is a left wing nutjob. He's done nothing but cause drama and attack people for years now.
Vaxry is an immature ~20 year old Polish dude. That means a bit of angst, Eastern European humour, more conservative opinions than most US tech workers.
Yeah, Vaxry is considered abrasive to some of the ultra-privileged leftwing US tech sphere. Most people don't care, just as people don't care about DD's views when using Sway, Miguel de Icaza's views when using Gnome, etc...
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I mean, your comment doesn’t exactly sound non-whiney.
Hah true. Maybe he and I could be friends we both are very whiney and petty.
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It's not an article about competition. Forcing nixos in to any linux relevant discussion is a bit awkward, yea?
No hate, but I don't really feel like Arch + opinionated dotfiles is really in the same space as NixOS. If someone found setting up Hyprland or just installing Arch and some packages to be overly difficult, I can't imagine what they'd think of Nix.
(2025 Version): I use NixOS, btw
There's a sweet omarchy-nix config that I really like https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix
Nix is not competition. Nix is not attracting thousands and thousands of new, young Linux users and potential future contributors like Arch+Hyprland are.
Nix seems really cool, and I'd like to explore it. I'm spending more time with OpenBSD right now as that approach just seems simpler. I use Artix and hyprland at home though. It's a better desktop experience, I think. The only reason I'd use OpenBSD or NixOS in the desktop would be to try and learn it more so I was more comfortable in deployment.
I don’t know if either are attracting thousands, but both are attracting a lot, to be sure.
I don't get the sense that NixOS has much traction in desktop linux.
I don't give a shit about NixOS.
I'm surprised the DHH cult hasn't latched on to projects like Bluefin instead of this. They are way better workflows for development imo.
https://docs.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-dx/
They serve completely different purposes and are not mutually exclusive. The main takeaways from the ublue stuff is how they build immutable OS images and focus on container-based development workflows. Omarchy is all about ergonomic desktop configuration. They are both cool projects.
You could easily replicate the container-based development workflows on Omarchy with distrobox even if you won't be using an immutable OS image. With more effort, you could replicate the Omarchy desktop configuration on a ublue image. Someone already ported Omarchy to nixos. I think we will continue to see a lot going on with immutable, reproducible operating systems and Omarchy will kickstart some cool stuff with desktop configuration.
If you think it's a cult centered around him, why in the world would that surprise you?
Good point actually
Bluefin looks super interesting! But I'm personally on a "less cloud everywhere" kick. I'm running OpenBSD as a hobby machine because I want to get better at real UNIX administration, which seems like a lost art. So my gut feeling looking at bluefin is that separating the OS layer and the dev layer gets me farther away from bare metal, not closer, which is not what I want right now. But I'm totally open to the idea that it could offer a better experience, it's just that getting farther away from the core OS is not what I'm looking for right now.
That's why I really appreciate what DHH is doing both for desktop Linux and with Linux server deployment. I think there's a pretty comprehensive worldview in advocating for both of those technologies. Not sure if that makes me a cult member or what