The defaults for hyprland are pretty good in my eyes, I've made some tweaks to the colour scheme, animations and even animated window borders but really its what you make of it.

Love using Hyprland, its minimal (which is a plus for me), no real issues outside of a sleep bug with my laptop when running hybrid graphics mode (amd igpu + nvidia gpu)

If you are not building your hyprland config from nix (as I am currently via symlinks) you can save the config file, and it will already be active allowing you to quickly test / amend / break all the things. For my config I need to rebuild the system, logout and login to see changes. Since I've been using Hyprland for a while now I've not needed to make many changes to the config so that works better for me.

I jumped from KDE to Hyprland, without having used a tiling window manager before, so adding all the necessary applications for things like brightness control, audio control was all quite a bit to take in from a full-fledged desktop environment.

I tried it out for the first time, the other day. The defaults are so good that you could get away with not configuring it at all!

Unless you want theme customisations and you have particular donkeys and workflows obviously.

To break it down, tiling wm just.. manage windows.

Since I posted my config here it's changed quite a bit. If you wanted to rip out my hyprland.conf check /nixos/home/hypr/default.nix

There should be some home.file = text '' text here ''; with my config for the bones I use.

You should be able to decipher where these should live, but some of the values like ${spaghetti.user} or the nix-colors palette values won't work without too having that installed.

~

My first days of using hyprland went something like this:

What package would you need to change wifi configurations. You using NWM, IWD or WPA? Does that package have a GUI or are you comfortable using the terminal in TUI or typing configurations via commands, or editing files using vi / nano?

Oh, that package you just installed isn't running at boot, better add that to the exec once in hyprland.conf

Wait that package should be added as a service and not as the package?! Do I still need to enable the package or does services.foo.enable = true; handle that?

Home-manager sounds like a waste of time, why would I want refactor my config for the Nth time?

Man Home-manager makes configuring everything so easy, why was I doing everything manually before?

Wait I don't have a calculator installed? Why am I editing basic text files in Lite-XL? Oh, I'll need some scripts to change keyboard brightness, I could add a Dunst notification to foo.bar that would be cool! Man I wonder if this program let's me change XYZ?

It's become a lot 😅

~

Once I got out of that mess, picked some basic packages that fit my needs I moved onto... adding more packages, configurations, modules, hosts, theming support and so on.

For your gaming question, yeah it works great! If your using NVIDIA hardware read the wiki and add the suggested config options to hyprland.conf but it all should hit the ground running without much configuration. The closed drivers will perform much better in gaming.

If your on AMD Graphics just send.

Full screen games work fine, same with windowed.

If you've not tried gaming under Wayland you shouldn't really be too concerned, it works mostly fine these days under Steam / Proton. Expect ~some~ issues but it's always good to expect worse than you'll receive.