Linux: Hyprland + NixOS: Fun, but pausing for now
I started my Linux journey on a cheap ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 and I opted for NixOS as my Linux distro. It's been great, but to spice things up I also tried Hyprland.
Hyprland is a window manager that automatically organizes new windows for you. At the end of it, you basically have a no-mouse setup– or at least you're not dragging around windows. There are other alternatives (like Sway) out there and they all run a bit differently. I'm not an expert on how Hyprland works (and honestly it's not that important), but there are many people out there who've already written articles on the topic.
If you search "hyprland rice" on Youtube, you'll get endless cool setups.
Sidenote: Hyprland has some problematic history
The creator of Hyprland, Vaxxry, has been banned from a number of Linux communities. I leave it to read to search why, but it's not great.
I willingly tried Hyprland knowing a bit about the drama, but that's not an endorsement of the creator.
My Setup
Hyprland looks cool. That is maybe the one great thing about it. It looks and feels super minimalist.
Hyprland is hard, but cool
Part of me wanted to believe I could make it my daily driver, but the learning curve and required setup is a lot to take on (you setup basically everything). For now, I'm pausing on Hyprland 🛑, but maybe I'll revisit it once I'm ready again. I still have my configs, everything is NixOS based, so I can rebuild my existing setup in a single command.
Here are some of the things you have to setup that you'd otherwise get for free with other distros:
- a task bar
- volume control, brightness control
- search (programs, files, etc.)
- lock screen
- network setup
- file viewer
- power on/off
- auto-sleep the computer
- many other things, but basically everything
The other upside/downside of Hyprland is that it's basically runs on hotkeys. You set those hotkeys so that's nice, but nevertheless you have to remember them. If you step away from your Hyprland setup for a bit, it can feel pretty alien when you come back.
Getting Started
There are a number of tutorials out there, but this is the one that got me started:
For my navigation bar, I ended up finding someone else's implementation online then grabbing what I wanted from it:
Unfortunately I spent countless hours watching videos, reading blogs, etc. to figure out a working setup. It just takes time and I can't remember all the resources I used.