hyprland-wiki/pages/Getting Started/Master-Tutorial.md

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2	Master tutorial

If you are coming to Hyprland for the first time, this is the main tutorial to read.

This tutorial covers everything you need to get things going. It links to other pages where necessary.

Install Hyprland

See Installation and come back here once you have successfully installed Hyprland.

Install kitty (default terminal emulator). This is available in most distros' repositories.

Nvidia?

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If not using an Nvidia card, skip this step.

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Please take a look at The Nvidia page before launching. It has information regarding the needed environment and tweaks.

VM?

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If not using a VM, skip this step.

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In a VM, make sure you have 3D acceleration enabled in your virtio config (or virt-manager) otherwise Hyprland will not work.

You can also passthru a GPU to make it work.

Please bear in mind 3D acceleration in VMs may be pretty slow.

Launching Hyprland

Hyprland can be executed by typing Hyprland in your tty.

Systemd users can also start Hyprland, using uwsm. This is the recommended method of launching Hyprland on systemd-based distros, as it provides additional features such as xdg-autostart support, launching any application as a systemd-unit with uwsm app helper, and the ability to enable services for programs that rely on a graphical session and provide such services (e.g waybar). See uwsm page for further instructions.

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Do not launch Hyprland with root permissions (don't sudo)

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You can see some launch flags by doing Hyprland -h, these include setting the config path, ignoring a check for the above, etc.

Login managers are not officially supported, but here's a short compatibility list:

• SDDM → Works flawlessly. Install sddm ⩾ 0.20.0 or the latest git version (or sddm-git from AUR) to prevent SDDM bug 1476 (90s shutdowns).
• GDM → Works with the caveat of crashing Hyprland on the first launch.
• greetd → Works flawlessly, especially with ReGreet.
• ly → Works poorly.

DE-like pre-configured setups

Do you want to just get Hyprland pre-configured like a DE, without making your own configuration from scratch?

Check out the Preconfigured setups page to see a few options.

These dotfiles should do everything for you, and have their own tutorials as well.

If you choose to use those, you can skip the next step. However, it's still recommended to read all the points below it. They'll give you recommended apps, replacements for old X11 software, information about configuring displays, etc.

In Hyprland with the default config

You're good to go with your adventure, technically.

Use SUPER + Q to launch kitty. If you wish to choose the default terminal before you proceed, you can do so in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf (example config).

If you want the best experience with less hassle googling, keep reading.

Critical software

See the Must-have Software page for the crucial things to make Wayland / Hyprland / other apps work correctly.

Monitors config

See Configuring Hyprland page to learn all about configuring your displays.

Apps / X11 replacements

See the Useful Utilities page and the Sway wiki page about that. You can also visit the Awesome-Hyprland repository for a more comprehensive list.

Fully configure Hyprland

Head onto the Configuring Hyprland page to learn all about configuring Hyprland to your liking.

Cursors

Cursors are a notorious pain to set up when you don't know how. See this FAQ entry

If your cursor does not appear, see this FAQ entry

Themes

Since Hyprland is not a fully-fledged Desktop Environment, you will need to use tools such as lxappearance or nwg-look (recommended) for GTK, and qt5ct / qt6ct for their respective Qt versions. Some older applications may also require qt4ct.

Force apps to use Wayland

A lot of apps will use Wayland by default. Chromium (and other browsers based on it, or Electron) don't. You need to pass --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland to them or use .conf files where possible. Chromium-based browsers also should have a toggle in chrome://flags. Search for "ozone" and select Wayland. If you are on NixOS you can also set the environment variable NIXOS_OZONE_WL=1 in your configuration.

For most electron apps, you should put the above in ~/.config/electron-flags.conf. Note that VSCode is known not to work with it.

A few more environment variables for forcing Wayland mode are documented here.

You can check whether an app is running in xwayland or not with hyprctl clients.