Context#
8 months ago, I moved back to Linux. I chose CachyOS.
Last time I used Linux full-time was 2021 and I was running stock Ubuntu (GNOME). I also had a short love story with Fedora + KDE Plasma but alas, I moved back to MacOS for work.
Hyprland#
In the past two years, I’ve been using Aerospace on my Mac.
And I grew to love proper tiling software: while I had been using shortcuts for decades to manage windows placement, having a proper system to move and focus windows was a gamechanger.
I therefore wanted to try a compositor that was built for tiling. I knew of i3, but it looked ancient. Many software poised themselves as its spiritual successor, but I was drawn to the shiny new thing: Hyprland.
Ngl, /r/unixporn did a good job with propaganda.
But after 8 months I was often running into small issues:
- Fractional scaling played poorly with games and xwayland apps
- Some popups like the BitWarden dialog in FireFox were buggy
- It played poorly with Blender, starting the dialogs at a static, small size
- I was getting some decision fatigue of having to pick a file explorer, setting up my own bar, adding my own widgets for everything, …
KDE#
So I decided it was a good time to give a second shot to KDE Plasma.
Long story short: I hate it.
It is sold as “extremely customizable” but all it means is that there are 1500 options hidden in GUIs with unclear effects.
And the most popular plugin on the KDE plugins store is a tiling one… That has been abandoned for 4 years. The plugins page looks abandoned, not great for an “extensible” DE.
All in all, I really disliked KDE. It was extremely heavy with tons of pre-installed software while not offering good core features and being extremely hard to actually customize.
Hard pass.
Cosmic#
I had given Cosmic a very short test a year ago and was pleasantly surprised.
So I decided to try it again: what’s not to love about a small but complete DE with tiling as a first-class feature?
Honestly, not much. It was mostly great, and it’s the only DE where fractional scaling of Xwayland programs was perfect out of the box.
But there are a few issues:
- There’s like zero documentation. Pretty annoying for a DE that prides itself as being “simple to customize and extend”
- If the default behaviour does not suit you, there’s often no way to change it
- There were tons, tons of small bugs and really un-intuitive behaviours
- Animations were extremely distracting. No, I do not want half my windows to disappear for 5 frames when I change focus
All in all I really liked it, but I could not see myself use it as a daily driver yet. Maybe in a few years.
Sway#
At that point I was lost.
A friend asked me why I had not just tried Sway, since it was rock solid, had a good set of core features, and I was used to i3 through Aerospace.
Which were compelling arguments. I installed Sway.
And I don’t understand how you can have a compositor in 2026 that just plays so poorly with fractional scaling. Even in good native Wayland software like Firefox, 1.5x scaling looked like shit. They make a point in their wiki that you are stupid for wanting fractional scaling, and should not do it.
The rest was mostly great, but in the end it just felt like a boring version of hyprland with an ancient conf format.
Return to hyprland#
Sometimes, you’d rather stick with the issues you know.
Yesterday, I installed hyprland again.
And it works fine, mostly.
Now that the conf is in lua, I can even simplify a lot of my shell scripts to just be lua functions.
Pop ups work better now and I don’t have the same issues I had a week ago on my bloated conf anymore as I re-started from scratch.
It’s ok.
I still would like to have a more batteries included DE with first class tiling, but I’ll take what I have.
I still want a DE-like experience so maybe I’ll try Noctalia. Or give Caelestia a second shot, since it has a vertical bar (I love those).
Ricing never ends.