So I’ve been using Linux for about a year and a half, have been using Window managers since a few wweks in, have been using Wayland for the last 3 months or so, and have been using Hyprland for about a month. I love it and I want to stick with it in the long term, but I need a distro that supports it.
My essential needs are:
Hyprland NWG-Look (for gtk themes) CMUS Thunar Ristretto bemenu j4-dmenu-desktop (can build from source) Vivaldi (can use deb/rpm/extra repo)
My main issue stems from the fact that:
I want Stability. As such, Arch (and derivatives) are out of the question.
I don’t like immutability. As such, NixOS is out of the question.
I’m concerned about the future of Fedora. It’s where I’m at right now, yet the telemetry proposal, if accepted, would mean I need to switch.
If you have any other distros that fit my criteria, please leave them below. I know void can take care of all of these, except Hyprland itself and while River is available (and River is amazing) I would prefer to run Hyprland instead.
Arch, what do you mean with “stability”?
That the installation is stable, as opposed to constantly changing, as is the case (by design) with rolling release distros (e.g. Arch). Package version updates are conservative to prevent surprises.
Hyprland is still a young project, it is also a wayland compositor, I think the rolling release model is benefitial in these cases
Mainly that there aren’t that many broken packages (which seems to happen more often now, than it used to, with Arch)
As an Arch user for 3 years, I can corroborate this. Steam recently broke because a shared library updated, so I had to downgrade it. There was that whole pipewire nonsense before that. It only happens every few months, but it’s annoying when it does. And some packages aren’t as up-to-date as I would like, so OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora are looking like attractive options to me in the near future.
Yeah, I agree with all you said. I’m on Arch currently, and I’ve forgotten how simple the post-install setup is (as long as you know what you’re doing). Funny, it was also my first time installing Arch the Arch Way, even though most of my year and a half on Linux has been on Arch and derivatives.