this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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I told myself I wasn't gonna do it anytime soon but I distro hopped from Endeavour OS to Arch with Hyprland in the span of 3 days. Nothing against endeavour. I just tried to customize, broke some stuff and decided to try Hyprland again. I'm quite liking it. It takes awhile to get used to it but it's fun. I cloned a repo for a customized version of it. I don't know how long I'll stick with it but wish me luck!

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Good luck then. I spent happy years on Arch but recently hopped to Void because lately Arch packages broke to much (mainly because of my choices to be honest) and I wanted something different (not specifically no systemd)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah Void is fantastic. I just switched back and I doubt I’ll be moving to anything else.

I only switched away in the first place because I had gotten so comfortable I wanted to try something new (Guix, also amazing!).

But there’s something so comfy about Void once you grok it, just lots of little good decisions which add up to a great experience.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

@mrh @Qpernicus it also has a very cool name i switched to it because of that, also do the android dream of ele

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What Arch based distoe were you on? I would love to spend some time on Debian and OpenSUSE eventually. Also Fedora is intriguing, I wished I tried it already.

I've had experience with Debian based and Arch based distros only. I was on Majaro for months before I had to switch back to windows and leave Linux behind for awhile

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think when he said arch he meant arch and not arch based?!?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depends on the distro, something like EOS is basically Arch with fancy pants on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I spent happy years on Arch

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But I was told by the fanboys that Arch never breaks. Could they have lied to me?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No. And arch never broke on me. But some packages did and lately they were just more of those. Admittedly a few were the -git version. And I just wanted something else

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But some packages did

So Arch broke for you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The OS was perfectly usable, it were just some applications that changed dependency and such. So no I don’t agree that arch broke on me. That doesn’t mean Arch is perfect.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

When a package is not working well, the distribution is said to be broken, at least for that package. This is the Debian definition.

The arch definition is "it's not arch's fault lmao"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I like the aggression on "fanboying Arch," while there's you cherry picking stuff when they're literally mentioning git packages.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He said "some of them", meaning not all packages that broke were -git.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I know, but did you ever ask what those packages are? Are they dependencies? Are the packages that broke came from Arch User Repository? Somehow, you immediately ruled out PEBKAC? I don't know, you're a Linux user, this stuff is pretty basic no? I don't get the anti-fanboyism.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Once you go Arch it's hard to go back.

Good luck!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It kinda is, just went from EOS to Arch with Hyprland today. It's hard to move to something that feels less up to date.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

It's true, I didn't go back to Ubuntu on Arch. But I did move on eventually. But it was actually quite easy.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What exactly is Hyprland? I looked at the site quick but I couldn’t quite figure it out from the description.

Disclaimer: I’ve only ever used Linux servers, not really as a desktop beyond vanilla Ubuntu

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From what I can tell it's a compositing window manager for wayland (the potential successor to X11, in case you didn't know). It does make things very neat and pretty though.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To add to this: Wayland is a bit different than X11. In X11 you had split responsibilities: Compositing, X Server and Window Manager. Wayland only refers to the protocol and compositors implement that protocol. So Hyprland is a compositor which implements the wayland protocol. The compositor has a lot more responsibilities in wayland since it needs to do everything itself which in X11 was split across different applications.

Here's a neat site for the wayland protocol: https://wayland.app/protocols/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So what's the difference between a compositor, a window manager and a desktop environment? I'm still a bit confused about the whole thing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Desktop environment is like traditional windows desktop, everything included. It has stuff like notification daemons, advanced settings, toolbars, task manager and so on.

Window manager let's you manage windows but often doesn't have it's own toolbar, notification demon, task manager and other things. People who run window managers are picking their own toolbar software, their own notification daemon and so on. They want a much more customizable personal experience, often heavily themed as well. Usually a window manager is also faster than a desktop environment since it does less things.

Compositor is what gives drop shadows, transparency and other visual effects. Its often built into desktop environments but is often missing from window managers, but not always. When it's missing, people install one of their own. There are a few popular choices.

Examples of desktop environments: Gnome, KDE Example of window managers: Sway, Hyprland, i3, xfce, awesome wm

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Window Manager written in C++. Has fancy animation out of the box.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nice, I'm experimenting with Manjaro on an old laptop now, trying to figure out if I can switch to it full time

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I used to be on Majaro for awhile, years ago but I wouldn't recommend it now. It doesn't have any of the advantage of an Arch based distro. Their own repo has issue. I would recommend Endeavour OS

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

you should set up some btrfs snapshots to avoid this feeling of wanting to jump ships when you mess everything up.

edit: I just checked the hyperland website, and damn that looks good... I might distro hop too

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

btrfs snapshots

I had a snapshot with Timeshift but did not revert back any changes made to the theming I was working on, so I distro hopped.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Timeshift makes OS snapshots, but theming is stored almost all the time in the home directory. Deleting your home directory or only select folders (e.g. .config) would've probably reset theming. Or creating a new user.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is all I needed to check what Hyprland is about.

Also why do you need to distrohop?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What WM did you use on EOS, and what is the improvement in Hyprland?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

i3 for while but I mainly used xfce. Hyprland overall feels "new", unlike X11, Wayland just "flows" better in a way. i3 felt more clunky but overall more stable, if that ever makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was using I3 and now sway. But I never felt any real difference in performance. Other than better 4K and multimonitor support, why i switched. I was wondering if Hyprland is just for looks or it brings something important

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Not much difference between sway and Hyprland

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

if you want i3 but on wayland, you could try sway. It is exactly that, you can even reuse most of your i3 config file.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Want your brains blown? Check out ArchCraft. Yes it's a pay to download thing but they cover everything, i3, Sway, Hyprland, QTile. You name it, they have it (as long as it's WM). For people like me who don't have time (nor skill, I'm humble enough to admit it) this is gold. And you can change themes as you like as long as you have basic intermediate skills. As long as you can use a text editor and have some basic arch skills you can customize upon it.

With that being said, I don't like pay to download content, reason why I'm on Linux first and foremost. But I gotta give credit where credit is due. ArchCraft is blowing away everything else when it come to pre customized WM experiences. Such an eye candy omg.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Shout out to fellow Arch person!

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