This is the only DE/WM I have ever heard of having "premium" features. I don't have a problem with the developers trying to bring in some funding but this is bizarre.
I predict there is around a 0% chance that someone won't fork hyprland and implement the premium features themselves. Especially in this scene.
I really don't understand why all the lazy complaints about how the 'purchase a hyprland premium subscription' page doesn't provide an exhaustive explanation of what Hyprland is are top of this comments section. The homepage, at https://hypr.land, does that pretty well.
As for the move by the hyprland maintainers to go down this freemiumesque route (which I assume is why this link was actually posted and is top of HN), all I'll say is that Niri[0] is absolutely fantastic, and I expect it's about to get even more popular.
I've got absolutely no problem with them taking donations / having a premium option. But it is very difficult to comment on when there is no indication what the premium experience brings.
Some context for anyone unfamiliar with the linux desktop space:
Hyprland is a "wayland compositor" (roughly analogous to an X Window Manager) that is under active community development: https://hypr.land
Wayland is considered the future of the linux desktop and is what projects like Valve's SteamDeck are using: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
It's known that Hyprland Premium is going to include a bunch of pre-made dotfiles including a Quickshell bar config, if you want to see the current top-tier rice: https://quickshell.outfoxxed.me/
Great. If they can make some money out of this, why not?
I wonder what happens if they lock down some features as premium-only. The competition is tight in this space and there are tons of alternatives to Hyprland, like Sway, River, etc. Monetizing open-source code sounds like a dangerous path...
There needs to be more opinionated / zero configuration setups in the Linux desktop space. The PopOS! tiling mode is miles easier to setup.
Ghostty's popularity also seems to hit on those developers.
I really hope that Hyprand premium does magic with those insights.
I'm a big fan of Hyprland and have made a Fedora Atomic based setup using it across multple devices. I migrated from a few years of using Manjaro Sway. It feels streamlined and I really like how clean the configuration is - keeping multiple machines operating the same is mostly just syncing .config/hypr
This reminds me that I've been meaning to donate, but this page feels... unfinished? The links don't work and there's no explanation of what you get from premium.
What does "Premium Desktop Experience" actually mean?
I do like hyprland, Its what I have installed. I hope they can offer 5$. of value to people with their 'premium' experience, I just think its either way too little or way too much additional support for what their price suggests.
Things that are close to this value proposition:
Video streaming services
Online game subscriptions
Data backups
VPN
Very few of these actually offer anything for 5$ a month and they do not offer 'customer support' or 'forum support' in the way you would probaly expect from people that offer that for your linux desktop. If anything, I expect the value proposition to be more like custom art pieces, where someone actually sits down with you for an hour, writes down what you want and programs up an entirely artisic desktop representation for whatever theme/idea you have. That would cost hundreds of dollars and would be a far better value proposition and the person in question could always be called upon for aftercare and newer projects.
I've been using Hyprland now for 4 months and it's my first tiling WM experience. I absolutely love it and actually donated 10 euro to the dev(s?).
Having said that: This is simply not mature enough yet to warrant a 60 euro a year subscription, regardless of premium features.
To be clear, I do see the potential and I would actually pay it but this is too early.
Premium support with a foss product seems like a win-win idea. Hope it goes well. Reminds me to donate to the stuff I use daily.
This feels more like a wake-up call to make people donate for the products they use, which I'm all for.
I have no experience with owning a product but I assume that if donations don't succeed you have to opt for these methods
Iād happily pay for it to support the devs. I like hypr
The Discord "Nitro" of window managers (with the same demographic I would guess)?
It's surprising to me that attractive, GPU-accelerated window compositing is not a 100% solved problem in the Linux ecosystem. I'm assuming I'm missing some huge technical challenge. Does anyone have the ELI5 on this?
How to fail at a product website lesson #1: Don't describe the purpose and show the experience of your product on the home page.
I have no idea what "Hyperland" is.
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I miss simple Windows-like experience in Linux. I fondly remember GNOME 2 days. It was the best Linux experience I've ever had. Task bar with open window buttons and workspace switches. Icon tray. Start menu. It just worked. These days it's either GNOME with its weird approach to UI, KDE with infinite number of settings that put me into depression the moment I open their control panel or those weird tiled WMs which I have zero interest in, because I almost never split my screen, all my windows are maximised 99% of time.
I've been using hyprland for about 6 months now, it's undeniably performant, buttery-smooth even but there are still a lot of paper cuts there - I have a feeling this will piss quite a few people off given the temperament in the Linux community for subscription-based software; also feel like it's not really the smartest thing to do if good alternatives already exist for what you're building (sway is not far off in quality)
Had to chuckle at the idea of hyprland support because the few times I had issues prior to this (with getting a nonstandard setup to work) I got made fun of on the discord which goes with the general vibe of getting support on discord so I wasn't mad at all, and eventually figured it out. The wiki does need a lot of work because I followed it and installing the recommended terminal emulator (kitty) was what caused a lot of hair pulling. Ghostty works far better.