hyprland-wiki/pages/Useful Utilities/Must-have.md

---
weight: 1
title: Must have
---

This page documents software that is **strongly** recommended to have running
for a smooth Hyprland experience.

DEs like Plasma or GNOME will take care of this automatically. Hyprland will
not, as you might want to use something else.

### A notification daemon

_Starting method:_ most likely manual (`exec-once`)

Many apps (e.g. Discord) may freeze without one running.

Examples: `dunst`, `mako`, and `swaync`.

### Pipewire

_Starting method:_ Automatic on systemd, manual otherwise.

Pipewire is not necessarily required, but screensharing will not work without
it.

Install `pipewire` and `wireplumber` (**not** `pipewire-media-session`).

#### Non-systemd distros

Since there is no truly standardized way (outside of systemd) to load PipeWire
when starting a graphical shell,[^1] non-systemd distros like Gentoo or Artix
provide a dedicated launcher.

It can be usually found by running `whereis <distro>-pipewire-launcher`. If such
a file does not exist on your install, please refer to your distro's
documentation for help.

[^1]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PipeWire#OpenRC

### XDG Desktop Portal

_Starting method:_ Automatic on systemd, manual otherwise.

XDG Desktop Portal handles a lot of stuff for your desktop, like file pickers,
screensharing, etc.

See the [Hyprland Desktop Portal Page.](../xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland)

### Authentication Agent

_Starting method:_ manual (`exec-once`)

Authentication agents are the things that pop up a window asking you for a
password whenever an app wants to elevate its privileges.

Our recommendation is the KDE one. For arch, it's `polkit-kde-agent`.

You can autostart it with
`exec-once=/usr/lib/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1`. On some distributions
you might have to use a different path which could be
`/ usr/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1`,
`/usr/libexec/kf5/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1`, or
`/usr/libexec/kf6/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1`.

On other distributions that use a more recent version, such as Gentoo, it may be
necessary to use
`exec-once=/usr/lib64/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1` instead.

### Qt Wayland Support

_Starting method:_ none (just a library)

Install `qt5-wayland` and `qt6-wayland`.