Hyprland

For fifteen years tiling window managers had competed in austerity: dwm in 2,000 lines, i3 without a single wasted pixel. Hyprland went the other way. Windows slide into place, workspaces sweep in from the side, borders get gradients, and whatever sits behind a translucent window is blurred — all in C++, with a config file that is reloaded the second it is saved. The layout is dynamic tiling in two flavours, dwindle and master, and hyprctl drives everything from outside so that scripts and status bars can talk to the compositor. Around the core grew a family of its own: hyprpaper, hyprlock, hypridle, a dedicated portal and a plugin API.

Hyprland originally sat on its own fork of wlroots, but in August 2024 it replaced that base with the in-house Aquamarine library and left wlroots behind entirely. The project is also known for its tone: Drew DeVault, author of Sway and wlroots, published a post in 2023 calling the community toxic, and in spring 2024 Vaxry was banned from freedesktop.org's infrastructure after a dispute over its code of conduct. Users have not been deterred; for a generation that has moved to Wayland, Hyprland is often the first thing they have seen that makes Linux look like a demo, which is precisely the point.