The main reason I had started using Arch Linux in the first place is the
amount of customizability that distros which mainly use Gnome don't
offer. I had gotten it mainly to try ricing, which took me about half a
year to get to with all my university responsibilities and my lack of
motivation. I had an idea that I wanted to make a pretty Catppuccin
themed rice for a little while and after browsing r/UnixPorn and seeing
this post, I started trying to make my own.
Hyprland
What is Hyprland? I
hadn't the slightest idea but seeing that most posts on the
aforementioned subreddit used Hyprland as their desktop enviroment, I
wanted to do the same. To quote it's GitHub and save myself some
brainpower trying to think of an explanation, "Hyprland is an
independent, highly customizable, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that
doesn't sacrifice on its looks." It is a tiling window manager, which
splits up your screen into tiles by default, as opposed to a floating
window manager, which everyone is accustomed to, through Windows, MacOS,
Gnome, KDE Plasma and such. This difference, as well as different
controls through keybinds instead of using icons, takes a little to get
used to but I haven't had issues for more than three days or so.
When I set my mind on using Hyprland, I was a little scared to commit to
it fully before trying it out, because of my paranoia that Arch will
break even if I look at it the wrong way. Thankfully, it's incredibly
easy to test. You simply download Hyprland using yay for the newest
version:
yay -S hyprland-git
Load into a different TTY using Ctrl+Alt+F2 (or F3 and so on...) and
execute the hyprland command. You'll load a Hyprland session, while
having your original session available on TTY1, and can try configuring
anything you'd like without being scared of messing something up and
being stuck. Well at least I had that fear.
Utilities
A downside of Hyprland is that is is not very usable out of the box as
opposed to KDE, but doing everything yourself is one of the wonders of
Linux. An upside of Hyprland is that many of the programs you will use
only need a .conf file to customize anything you need.
Terminal
Arguably the most important part when using Linux. I've tried a few
terminals on both Ubuntu Gnome and Arch KDE Plasma, however I've stayed
with the default terminal on Hyprland, which is Kitty, for its
simplicity and minimalist looks without any bars or buttons. Kitty's
configuration file isn't in the hypr directory within the .config/
direcory within your user, but in its own one.
Wallpaper
The most used wallpaper utility on Hyprland is
Hyprpaper. I have chosen a nice looking wallpaper from
this GitHub repo
which hosts tons of Catppuccin themed wallpapers. Only thing I needed to
do to set the wallpaper is write two lines in a .conf file and autoload
Hyprpaper on startup.
Taskbar
There is no taskbar by default and you have to download one yourself.
One that is used the most is
Waybar
but it's very basic and seemed like it'd need a lot of work to transform
into something good looking. The Reddit post which inspired me
referenced
Hyprpanel, which
provides a lot of visually appealing utilities out of the box, although
at the cost of a lot of dependencies. It runs through AGSv1 at the
moment, but as far as I'm aware, the developers are looking to migrate
to a newer version of AGS.
Screenshotting
I'm using
Hyprshot with two keybindings, one for a screen selection and one for
full screen.
Theming and configuration
As I've mentioned, my goal was to get as Catppuccined as possible, which
is easy to achieve with their incredible
catalogue of ports.
This is everywhere I used any kind of Catppuccin theming:
As for configurations, I've shared my dotfiles in
this GitHub repo. If you simply clone them, they probably won't work, as some need to
be in their own directory (like Kitty) or include paths that are
relevant to only my system. I'm sharing those I have personally edited
to my own liking, when it comes to themes, you can find everything you
need to know in their own respective repos through the Catppuccin port
catalogue or in through the above links
Some of the changes I've made to my hyprland.conf is new keybinds to
switch workspaces and move windows through workspaces, scroll through
workspaces using keybinds, screenshotting, window border colours,
startup applications, and so on.
Future improvements
Currently, I don't lock whenever I sleep my laptop on Hyprland. I plan
to use Hypridle to watch for when I'm idle and execute Hyprlock to lock
me out. I'm also having issues with logging into the Eduroam Wi-Fi since
the Hyprpanel Wi-Fi utility only allows for the password input and
Eduroam needs both username and password. Currently I use:
nmcli dev wifi list sudo nmcli dev --ask wifi connect [SSID found from previous command]
It's simple to write a script to automate this, but I've been too lazy.
Conclusion
Overall this was an extremely pleasurable experience. I found it very
fun to figure everything out and customize everything to my own liking.
This is the most customization I've seen from a desktop enviroment so I
highly reccomend this to anyone who is interested in ricing.
