First of all, I’m sorry if it doesn’t belong in this sub. Advance warning for long rant. I am posting in this thread because Hyprland is my starting point and most of this comes from the fact because Hyprland is not a Desktop Environment like Gnome, KDE which comes with all bells and whistles. This post is not meant as complaints or discredit something.

At work I use Mac with remote to Linux desktop so not much option for any customization. Last week I bought a laptop and I was sure I want to install Linux and make it beautiful. In my past life during college, I have used and did used to be in this tinkering where every 3-6 months we will recompile kernel, re-form at, re-install, change distro, DE and all. So, I wasn’t completely new to this. Before this recently I have been watching lots of Neovim and Linux, Arch Linux, Hyprland related videos, so I was very much influenced.

First, I installed Omarchy. I liked the keybinds and general polished and complete setup of it but it was too opinionated for my taste. Also it messed up my window installation. I don’t care window as I can’t stand it, but still liked to dual boot for safety and warranty. I played around a bit and decided I don’t want Omarchy. Recovered windows and then installed Ubuntu. Ubuntu was solid but boring. After watching lots of videos, I decided I have to install Arch.

Started my Arch journey. While installing I was clear that I’ll make a separate home partition from root partition. I was also clear I want Hyprland. So I did install Hyprland. I liked it. Had some struggle with display manager and greeter, but with uwsm and sddm got it working. I tinkered the waybar, got inspiration from lots of dotfiles I found through YouTube. I liked it but still it’s not polished enough as I see on YouTube. One thing I was looking for is theming of applications. Then I tried few packaged setup like ml4w, JaKooLit. I didn’t like ml4w much and had many things broken and doesn’t work. I liked JaKooLit setup. It allows you to override things and generally well thought out, default were good. Then I saw about danklinux, it looked like a pro and very polished shell. So, I wiped my Arch and installed danklinux. However much I like the looks of danks theme, its custom dms shell I found it to be less hackable and customizable. It uses its own custom dank bar instead of waybar, has its own file browser, notepad, settings, wallpaper manager and everything. Of course it is made with Quickshell and should be possible to change but I thought it’s outside my skill and tolerance level. But it’s very well designed shell and automated theming using matugen is good. I didn’t like the keybindings much. Of course I can change it. Somehow it seems to me like a prepackaged OS like Apple or Windows. This is not what I liked Linux though. If I wanted id have got a Mac. So, this is not for me.

Last one week has been quite a journey. I have been putting up so much time that it started impacting my work and sleep. Every day I’d watch some videos and get sucked into it and would try config hopping. Every time I would start that I only want to fix this one thing and end up spending hours on something else.

So, after one week and two weekends this is where I’m at. I don’t think I like non-customization (or difficult to) of dank and dms. So, I’m going to uninstall that and will start with common Hypr ecosystem apps and find good dot files for those apps and make it how I like. This is what I learned with these experiments, I want:

A nice looking status bar. It is easy to do with waybar and I can achieve almost similar as dank bar 1.

Something I liked about dank is the modals it open when clicking on something in dank bar. I think I can build it using on click action in waybar using some standard app, tui. But I guess this is where dank bar shine. 1.

Good and productive keybinds to easily switch and navigate between windows, tabs, apps, workspace. This is my personal laptop which I don’t use with monitor so theres not enough space for more than one window in one screen so I’d like easy switch between workspaces and screen, utilizing easy keybindings and track pad gestures 1.

No custom app or shell but something off the shelf customized for theme and looks 1.

Good automated theming of all apps so they all look consistent. I liked the material theme and matugen. However this is where I consider myself lacking as this will require some scripting and works to sync the theme across all apps. Not all apps are easily themeable, Firefox is difficult. I know there is pywalfox but I find it hard to theme and make it look nice. Specially the tab bar and top bar combined takes significant vertical space for a small laptop. And vertical tab looks ugly af. Many other apps also looks odd. For ex I had thunar file browser and it didn’t fit well into theme. The color, the icon, the window and bars looks different on each app. But again I can guess they all are built for different distro with different engine so not surprising. 1.

I’d like to use much of Hypr ecosystem, hyprlock, hyprpaper, etc. 1.

I need to make wlogout pretty. 1.

I need to find a better way to start again than reinstalling Arch. Most of the time wiping out .config is fine, but I also would like to uninstall things not necessary and remove any unwanted services my previous setup enabled. 1.

I need to stop watching all ricing videos as they are endless. For some reviewing new riced theme and making it continuously is their job but for me it’s not..I just want to build a nice setup and then occasionally do minor tweaks. So, I should just search for what I want and not get carried away by all the new shiny things.

End of rant.

A few things on which I would like to have opinions:

How to make fonts look better. I installed discord official app and it looked so terrible I had to uninstall within 10 minutes after I couldn’t get it to look bearable. 1.

In general I have find fonts rendering pretty bad across all setup. Pics, wallpaper look nice but texts in gui app is worst. I have read many articles, videos for common things like install better fonts, anti aliasing, slight hint, disabling bitmap and all but none of these tweaks make it look as polished as windows or Mac. 1.

What’s your preferred method of trying out different ricing and then resetting it back. 1.

What are some good tui, or Hyprland specific apps you find better which is less known and can be themed more easily. I want some basic apps, like sound, network control, camera, file browser, system setting, system info and some common apps.