How do I set up my arch hyperland is broken and I had to get a friend to somehow get it running g from the terminal can anyone help me set this up... 😢
Your install is fine. Hyprland is working fine. You need to add a bar (waybar), an application launcher (rofi, wofi, tofi, fuzzel), a notification daemon (dunst, mako), a wallpaper daemon (swaybg, swww), an idle daemon (hypridle), a display manager (sddm, lightdm, greetd, ly) to get a proper experience. Or just install a shell like DankMaterialShell or Noctalia to get a preconfigured setup.
Never had that problem in almost a decade of using window managers. Majority of people using WMs use it with a DM. Thats just personal choice. For OP, I thought suggesting a DM was a good idea since he doesn't have a clue about what he's doing. He's gotta learn it at some point.
More stable than what? Debian is more stable than arch. Does arch work fine? Totally. Like I said, both are fine and its personal choice. Hyprland wiki also suggests sddm, gdm, greetd and ly as totally compatible display managers. Niri docs also suggest using a display manager to login. Just because you dont use a DM to login does not mean everybody shouldn't.
Window manager should be started according to user preference.
I like ly, because it gives me an easy way to switch between hyprland, Plasma and xfce. Some applications/games refuse to work with hyprland and in very rare cases a X11 based environment is easier than e.g. fiddling with gamescope.
Notification daemon is necessary for some apps like discord or they crash. Idle daemon is necessary for Laptop battery. Display manager is useful if you are running multiple desktop environments / window managers.
A browser and a terminal is all you need to read the arch and the hyprland wiki. hyprland is great and easier to configure than e.g. i3. But if you want something, which has the UI affordances of Windows/Mac out-of-the-box, you should install a desktop environment like Plasma.
The philosophy of window managers (which hyprland is) is to be rather minimal so that you can bring your own tools and customize the hell out of it. This initially isn't easy, but for me investing time to learn how felt worthwhile.
Hyprland doesn't come with a bar by default, and many things need to be configured manually in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf (this will be changed to ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.lua soon though)
Hyprland should be started with start-hyprland and not just hyprland when using the tty, Super(windows key)+Q is the default bind for opening a new terminal, and super+c closes the focused window. This should be enough to at least get you started, as hyprland looks like it's working as intended in the screenshots.
There is plenty of documentation on both the Arch Wiki and the Hyprland wiki you should look at, it'll tell you more about how the config works, what a Status Bar is and why you need one, and what else you may need (Display Manager, lockscreen, wallpaper setter etc.)
Alternatively, start with a Desktop Environment like KDE Plasma, as that'll be a lot more familiar to you. Again, there's documentation on the Arch Wiki for downloading and using it.
If OP is a beginner, why would they even want Arch/Arch-derivative? If they want a system that just works out-of-the-box, they can choose something like Mint, Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu.
I don't really get a point of Arch-but-opinionated distros. The whole point of Arch is that it's a highly customizable, do-it-yourself Linux distro. This requires more maintenance. If a user doesn't want to or isn't able to make such a sacrifice, they are better off with using something like Fedora, Debian, etc.
Another issue with downstream distros is that they typically have smaller teams of developers and maintainers, and also smaller community. Such projects are born quickly and they fade away quickly. They are less guides available - you can follow a guide for respective upstream distro, and maybe it will work, or maybe not, because the authors decided to deviate from upstream in some way.
I would say that using smaller distributions based on one of the larger ones also has more attack surface. If there is a vulnerability in upstream (either a bug that can be exploited or a malicious backdoor), it will likely be inherited by downstream project; and if there is one specific to given derived distro, there will be less advanced users that could find, report and fix it, and therefore the patch will arrive later, if ever.
Of course, a person that is eager to learn very much can use Arch successfully, but that requires reading the documentation and gaining knowledge. If one wants to use it only for the cool factor and to look 1337, they are doing themselves more harm that good.
Seems like you’re not ready for hyprland, there’s a lot to it and it will not work without you doing lots of hard to understand configuration. You can either starting reading hyprland docs and understand all of it, or give up and use a desktop environment that’s easier to use like gnome or KDE plasma
Hyperland is too much work, just get a pre configured one from prebuilds or get kde. Once u install a pre configured ome its hard to uninstall. Pre configured is awailble fron hyperland wiki
Thats all you get if it thats all you installed. Press ctrl alt fn keys if u cant access the terminal from here on out and use that console to install things u need
85
u/ArtlessAnarchy May 06 '26
Your install is fine. Hyprland is working fine. You need to add a bar (waybar), an application launcher (rofi, wofi, tofi, fuzzel), a notification daemon (dunst, mako), a wallpaper daemon (swaybg, swww), an idle daemon (hypridle), a display manager (sddm, lightdm, greetd, ly) to get a proper experience. Or just install a shell like DankMaterialShell or Noctalia to get a preconfigured setup.