why i switched from hyprland back to kde

ok so i finally caved. after months of running hyprland, tweaking configs, swapping dotfiles like i was collecting trading cards, i'm back on kde plasma. and no this isn't one of those "i grew up and realized tiling wms are a meme" posts, hyprland is genuinely cool. it just stopped being worth it for me.

the honeymoon phase

hyprland looks incredible out of the box, and it looks even better once you start ricing it. animations, blur, rounded corners, the whole aesthetic package. i went through probably five or six different dotfile setups over the months, chasing that perfect look. it's fun in the same way customizing a rom used to be fun. you're not really using the thing, you're building it.

and for a while that's enough. you open a terminal, you feel like a hacker. you show your friends your workspace switch animation. genuinely a good time.

then you try to actually use it

here's where it fell apart for me. it wasn't one big thing, it was death by a thousand cuts. apps that worked fine on x11 or on a normal de would just misbehave under hyprland specifically. screen sharing in some apps was a coinflip. certain electron apps rendered weird or didn't scale right. window rules that worked last week would randomly stop applying after an update.

none of this is necessarily hyprland's fault directly, a lot of it is the wider wayland ecosystem still catching up in places, but when you're the one dealing with it at 11pm trying to just get something to work, you don't really care whose fault it is. you just want your stuff to open and behave.

the ui thing nobody talks about

separate from the app issues, the actual hyprland ui experience started grating on me even after swapping dots a bunch of times. not because it looked bad, i tried a lot of configs and some looked genuinely great, but the day to day interaction with it kept feeling slightly off. small inconsistencies here and there that you don't notice in a screenshot but absolutely notice when you're using the thing for eight hours.

kde doesn't have that problem because it's had like two decades to sand down those edges. it's not exciting, but it works the way you expect it to work, every time, without you having to think about it.

was it worth it

honestly yeah, i don't regret the time on hyprland. i learned more about how wayland compositors actually work than i would have just reading about it, and some of those rice setups genuinely looked better than anything kde can pull off without serious effort. but at some point your desktop environment shouldn't be a hobby you maintain, it should be a tool you stop noticing. kde lets me stop noticing it. hyprland never quite got there for me.

maybe i'll go back for a redo at some point when things mature more. for now though, plasma's got me and honestly it feels like coming home.