Tue May 19 02:49:04 AM CEST 2026

Hyprland is too Unstable for Me

I have exclusively been using Hyprland as my only desktop environment for my desktop computer for the past four years or so. I don't remember exactly why I chose Hyprland as my first Wayland compositor. I seem to remember that back in 2022 there weren't many viable Wayland compositors with a tiling window manager. Maybe I was just bad at finding them, but I remember trying both Sway and Hyprland one day, and since I prefer dynamic tiling over manual, Hyprland won out.

At first, I spent a lot of time "ricing" my setup. I spent time matching the color scheme across all of my programs, had a script that changed the theme for Waybar, Hyprland, Kitty, etc. I read the Hyprland wiki several times while trying to make it do exactly what I wanted. I made a script that listened to the Hyprland IPC and tiled my picture-in-picture video popouts on my second monitor exactly the way I wanted.

When it comes to raw customizability and flexibility, I think it is in a league of its own in the Wayland ecosystem. This probably stems from the main dev, Vaxry's, ability and willingness to add seemingly every feature imaginable to Hyprland. Be it new tiling algorithms, a notification system, plugin ecosystem or one of the hundreds of other small configuration options that tweak Hyprland's behavior.

With all of these features, and a new release roughly every other month, I have been quite impressed by the stability of Hyprland. For a new project existing in a moving Wayland world, Hyprland has been extremely solid for me in daily use. I can only remember a handful of genuine bugs related to Hyprland that has effected me, which is quite impressive considering the circumstances.

I'm the user, and my space is breaking!

Despite all of this, I find myself becoming increasingly disillusioned with Hyprland. Although Hyprland has mostly delivered what it has promised, it seems to have a philosophy of constantly breaking my config. When I first started using Hyprland, I think I was fine with this. After all, I was using a new Wayland compositor by a single person, and I was changing my config every other day anyway tweaking my setup.^[1] But as time passed, and my desire to waste time configuring my system waned, my patience for these breaking changes also faded.

In my previous post about using the Thinkpad x201t, I mentioned that my software had been in a bit of a turbulent state. This came from discovering that Hyprland was going to drop its legacy renderer, making future versions require GLES 3.0. This was not going to work for me, since the x201t's integrated graphics only support OpenGL 2.1. I know little to nothing about Hyprland's codebase, so I have no insight into whether or not this change was good from a developer's point of view. It probably did simplify the codebase, and if it were "broken and barely used" I can see why they removed it. But, it made Hyprland impossible to run on older hardware, which is something that I care about.

To get a working system up and running on my x201t I decided to use my old dwm config, and I am glad that I did. My ricing phase was already behind me at this point, and I found the more minimal and simple suckless X11 software^[2] to feel snappy. I started to appreciate the simplicity of the dwm bar over my Waybar config, dmenu over wofi, and the master stack layout over the default Hyprland dwindle layout.^[3] Perhaps the biggest takeaway from returning to my old configuration was that it worked flawlessly, after a year with no changes. This did not come as a surprise, I doubt Xorg received any meaningful updates while I was gone, and I know for certain that my dwm fork had zero changes. The feeling of knowing that nothing had or would change without my intervention was comforting.

I ended up making a dwl fork for my x201t,^[4] and I quickly started preferring it to my Hyprland setup, even though it crashed or hung 1-3 times per week. I have also been following river since before its 0.4 release, and I am waiting for one of its new window managers to be mature enough before I give it a proper try. I have a lot of respect for how River has handled its latest backwards-incompatible release. The old version of river is currently maintained on a separate branch, allowing existing users to still use the old river through river-classic. Meanwhile, there is commitment that the new river-window-management-v1 protocol is stable, and that river will not break window managers. I understand the pros and cons of both Hyprland and River's approach to breaking changes, and having both types of programs is probably nice for different people. After using Hyprland for the past four years, I think I prefer the latter.

The Surrounding Factors

I had always been a bit wary that Vaxry's vision of Hyprland didn't seem to align with my vision for a desktop. His goal seems to be making a whole suite of "hypr" tools, creating more of a desktop than just a Wayland compositor. The hyprwm organization on GitHub currently hosts 41 different projects, including a GUI PipeWire control center, a system info program, screen locking utility and a D-Bus alternative. I don't necessarily have an issue with any of these programs (I am a fellow D-Bus hater) but it's not something that interests me. Hyprland does not depend on these other "hypr" programs as of writing this, and I doubt it will in the future, but the whole ecosystem "vibe" does not sit well with me. One of the reasons that I avoid larger desktop environments is that I want to pick and choose my own software.

If you were not satisfied with my previous vibes-based argument against liking Hyprland, then you sure as hell won't like this one either! Online "communities" are weird. I have never understood people who hang around in public Discord servers, and I don't think much good comes from them. From a bird's-eye view of the situation, Hyprland seems to attract people who seek out public Discord rooms, and I don't like it! I remember reading the back-and-forth blogging duel between Drew DeVault and Vaxry when it happened, and my strongest impression coming out of this feud was that public Discords are pretty cringe.

My own, very opinionated view is that I don't think software projects should have Discord servers, especially if it allows for general off-topic discussions about almost anything (which the Hyprland Discord does). They seem to breed a kind of cringe, toxic subcultures that might be attractive to some teenagers, but that pushes everyone else away. They are also annoying in that they are not indexed by search engines, meaning that finding solutions to issues other users have already solved requires joining the server and digging through chat logs. If your software project has a Discord, I will think less of your software. Maybe a bit idiosyncratic, but it's how I feel.

There seems to be a million small grievances that I have with Hyprland. The Hyprland website sacrifices usability for eye candy, making my laptop work its ass off rendering its animations at even 5 fps. It uses a permissive BSD license rather than a copyleft license like the GPL, is hosted on GitHub, is written in C++, drama seems to follow the project, and I don't like any of its default wallpapers. None of these things are deal-breakers, or even wrong,^[5] but they do make me slightly less enthusiastic about Hyprland.

The Final Nail

After my Christmas break, I came back to my desktop computer with Hyprland. I upgraded my system and found that my config was broken again. This time, there were some changes to window rules. The previously default smart gap rules and all my other window rules were giving me error messages. I had also been using hyprpaper as my wallpaper setter for a while, and for the first time ever it was also complaining.^[6] I ended up just commenting out the offending config lines, and removing hyprpaper as a startup program. There was not a single bone in my body that wanted to spend 5 minutes looking up the changes and migrating my config.

My priorities had shifted, or at least crystallized. I did not care about all of Hyprland's bells and whistles. All I wanted from my desktop now was simple tiling to separate 1-3 windows on my screen, workspaces and maybe gaps. Hyprland can do all of this, in fact it probably does it straight out of the box, but there are no guarantees that it won't break your setup in the future.

What spurred me on to write this post was another update last week, I ran into another error (dwindle:pseudotile was removed, since it apparently did nothing). I checked the changelog for the latest release, and was greeted with the news that the Hyprland configuration is now done in Lua. My old config will still work, but only for a few releases. I think this is probably a good decision for Hyprland, given how complex the configuration had become. Moving to Lua will allow for even more powerful customization, and I'm sure it will be a welcome change in the Hyprland world. But I won't stay to see these changes.

It's not you, it's me

As a final note for this piece, I wanted to stress the fact that Hyprland really is an impressive and well-made piece of software. It has served me well for several years now, and I'm sure that it will remain one of the best Wayland compositors out there. Hyprland did not get worse while I was using it, rather, my own priorities and mindset have changed to the point where other projects suit my needs better. I might come back to it someday, but as of today I switched my desktop computer to my dwl build.

1. Hyprland also gives a usually informative message if there are any errors in your config, which is helpful in those situations.↩
2. I know X11 is neither minimal or simple, I am talking about the tools like dwm, dmenu and st.↩
3. I ended up changing to the master layout on Hyprland after this.↩
4. Why not stick with dwm and X11? I'm not entirely sure, but with how the tide is moving in Linux world, it seems to me like committing to Wayland at this point is the right choice for me.↩
5. I'm pretty sure I am guilty of having engaged in literally all of my above complaints!↩
6. While writing this post I decided to investigate the hyprpaper issue, it seems like they had a breaking change in the config as well.↩