No one's posting anything for me to read so..
I just got hyprland the other day, still getting everything setup so that I have a full desktop environment, but so far I am enjoying the process of picking and choosing each element.
Hyprland itself is great, but it really opened my eyes to wayland and how great the ecosystem is with stuff like Waybar, tofi and all the other tools.
I considered omarchy, but you have to install that like an OS, which sucks, so I ended up just installing hyprland (and the other stuff) manually, and I'm glad I did. Doing it manually forced me to learn how all the bits fit together, which I thought would be boring, thankfully it wasn't.
All of that and then before posting this I read this communities sidebar: "we don't agree with vaxry". Looked up "vaxry drama" just to now find out that they are encouraging and engaging in their own toxic community and stuff... if I knew that before, I probably wouldn't have gone down the rabbit hole that is hyprland and building your own DE like lego, mostly because: can you trust someone like that and feel good about running their code on your system?
I'm coming from being a KDE Plasma enjoyer for the past half-decade, and I have never heard any drama from their side so coming here and seeing that is kinda shocking, though I guess that's what you get when you have one core person building the software (who is still young themselves).
I think I'm going to stick with hyprland for now because looking back, KDE Plasma seems like a janky & slow mess in comparison to what I have now.
Still feels like a shame that good software is tainted by this type of behavior, I hope they and their community is getting better, but I'm not super up-to-date on the whole fiasco (just finished reading some old blog posts on it, nothing new, so maybe they have become better idk yet).
I know linux itself can have some toxic traits in the community, but usually that's just people being very forward in their communications. Nothing homophobic as far as I know..
You have any thoughts?
Bye
I tried out Hyprland about three months ago, too. I was enamored for a couple of weeks, and then found out about the toxic community. I switched to i3wm and have been a very happy camper ever since.
I've been a Linux user since '99 when the Windows 2000 beta pissed me off enough that I swore to never return. In all that time, I'd never installed a tiling window manager. It turns out that the tiling WM is what I had found the magic in, not Hyprland itself. As nice as Hyprland looks, it's pretty easy to get 90% of the way there with i3wm. Plus, it has all the functionality, without enabling toxic assholes. If you want to stick with Wayland, Sway is an implementation of i3wm in Wayland that is compatible with all the i3wm config files.
Interesting, my back story is a bit similar but different. I had an Amiga from 1992-1996 then I lost interest in computers. Back then the guys in my school who had a PC were kind of weirdos and never clicked with us who had Amigas, C64s or Ataris. Therefore Microsoft products have always been icky to me.
But then in 2001 there was all the talk about the internet around me and I wanted to know what it is about. But I knew I didn't want windows.
I bought a used Fujitsu PC and went to a local kiosk where for some reason they sold PC magazines with a CD of SUSE Linux and Mandrake Linux. I installed SUSE first but every change I did to a config file didn't survive a reboot, I think because of this registry-like yast which they used, so I switched to Mandrake.
That one was very cool, but I couldn't find a driver for the 56k modem for Linux which I had, and without Internet there was no point of having a computer in 2001.
This is why I installed windows 98 which had the driver preinstalled. Later I switched to windows 2000 which was better and shortly to windows XP all within a year.
By that time I moved in with my girlfriend and got ADSL. My HDD was too small for dual boot but with ADSL I didn't need a modem anymore just the network card which I knew would work on Linux. And with the second PC also online I was confident I could research problems.
So with this new confidence in 2002 I created a Debian netboot 3.5" floppy disk and instated Debian on that computer, it was glorious!
With a pause between 2006-2012 where I used OSX, I've been on Linux ever since.
SUSE -> Mandrake -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch btw.
And like you I just now tried a tiling window manager and am totally hyped about it.
Thanks for the advice, I may look into sway before I get too comfy.
I admire your commitment to leaving windows for so long! Definitely jumped off the train right before it crashed.