I’m really not a Windows Manager user on a daily bases but can see the benefits if you do a lot a IT or development work. I’ve watched a million WM videos, many of them Drew’s. I’ve built a lot of the ones that he did videos for.
I’ve found few that also accommodate mouse and menu to my liking. My daily drive is Debian 13 with KDE Plasma, but I’ve added the KWIN script Krohnkite which gives you DWM like WM feature once you edit the keyboard short cuts to match your needs.
This allows me to be a normal Plasma user but with tiling windows and all the key shortcuts to move around work spaces and windows just like any WM.
But if I had to choose a WM and stick with it, it would be Hyprland. The one I see from ML4W impresses me. But you have to be on Archlinux to use it currently.
I’d love to see that on Debian. I see that some version of Hyprland is in backports, but haven’t tried it yet.
Thanks, I did stumble across the first link and just tried it after playing around with a Forky install. Maybe that was my problem. Should I just install the basic no DE or WM from butterknife and follow the read me about the apt sources mods, etc?
Did you use the Linuxbeginnings link or the Jakoolit repository? The latter hasn’t been updated in many months, and was forked to Linuxbeginnings.
Pro tip when getting help online. Never say “it” or “didn’t work” or “got an error” It’s like goikng to the doctor and say “I have a problem” Dr asks “What it is?” You reply “You’re the Doctor you figure it out!”
People who support get tired of asking the basic questions over and over
Someone who provides the basics up front tend to get better responses.
I.e. running forky,in a VM, (or NVIDIA model X), ran install.sh from version x.x got this error
include the error
I.e. in your case how can I begin to know what the issue is ?
You don’t need to start from a blank system. Trixie, Forky, SID are all supported.
So I tried again, details below. However once I selected hyprland in sddm login I got into a hyprland session that is a blank screen with a waybar at the top. I can launch the hints and kitty. I can launch thunar and firefox, but no application launcher Meta + D.
I have all the logs. I’m using timeshift so I can go back to the fresh install of Debian Plasma.
Below are my notes:
Installed Forky using Debian net install ISO.
Made sure source repos were included.
Made sure the the grub option for installing the --removable option was selected.
Included KDE Plasma. (To give me something to work with if the install sort of works)
Choices:
You have selected the following options: │
│ │
│ - input_group │
│ - sddm │
│ - sddm_theme │
│ - gtk_themes │
│ - bluetooth │
│ - thunar │
│ - ags │
│ - quickshell │
│ - pokemon │
│ - dots
The script made some comment about since using Forky, it would enable trixie-backports to install hyprland from packages??? Never saw any indication that any modes were made to the sources.list.d/ files.
When the install script asked about did I really want to install the DOT files. Warned about version less than 54, I confirmed in another terminal that hyprland was version 55.
This part of the console log puzzled me:
Rust is installed now. Great!
To get started you may need to restart your current shell.
This would reload your PATH environment variable to include
Cargo’s bin directory ($HOME/.cargo/bin).
To configure your current shell, you need to source
the corresponding env file under $HOME/.cargo.
This is usually done by running one of the following (note the leading DOT):
. “$HOME/.cargo/env” # For sh/bash/zsh/ash/dash/pdksh
source “$HOME/.cargo/env.fish” # For fish
source “~/.cargo/env.nu” # For nushell
source “$HOME/.cargo/env.tcsh” # For tcsh
. “$HOME/.cargo/env.ps1” # For pwsh
source “$HOME/.cargo/env.xsh” # For xonsh
But the script kept running.
Let me know if I should change anything I did, and if I should post any log files.
I seem to have it working. I’m guessing the missing piece was needing the rofi package installed before building from source.
After I installed rofi and did the install.sh --source I still saw a check warning about swww not installed. So I went back and did just the install-scripts/swww.sh
I’ll play with what I have and see what I can learn.
Yeah wasn’t too had to figure out. awww does wallpaper, rofi does menus. SUPER SHIFT K is a searchable Keybinds menu. Including any that you add to the UserKeybinds.conf file
I am pretty sure I found the issue with that. I am testing a from zero install on Forky right now. Also you don’t need to have a GUI like KDE first. I enable SSH during install. Then just SSH into it. So I can copy / paste things if I need to. Or another alternative is use one of Drews GUIs. He also installs rofi in his WMs for sure. Assuming the test works I will push the update to main so if you install again sometime it should work fine. When you ran auto-install.sh or install.sh it should have prompted you to chose deb pkg or source build. And you can also switch between them later.
If you decide you like it. Here’s my discord server Kool's Tech World
I post current status of the next release, there are also HOWTO articles, etc.. And a channel to request support for KoolDots.
Just for fun, I’m going to start with one of Drew’s WM and edit the APT sources to include trixie-backports and the deb-src and see what happens with then install.
So I have a very good working solution. Hyprland on Debian Forky. I started with a minimal net-install of the Forky ISO including the same subvols that Drew uses. Then I installed timeshift, rofi, cloned the repo, and ran ./install.sh --source.
That seems to be the only way to get it clean. The install.sh --debian had too many errors.
Thanks for the help and a very good version of Hyprland.
I’ve been working out my issues with hyprland on Debian on the Discord channel linked above.
I now have what I want. Debian-Hyprland on trixie so I can maintain app compatibility. I used the install from source method and it worked, but like most build from source things, takes time to build.
I think Hyprland is one of my favorite WMs because you can just look at the bar at the top and see which numbered workspace has what app. it used the icons for file manager, browser, terminal, etc. So this old guy doesn’t have to remember where he put what. And I’m forced to put things on predetermined workspace numbers.
This was a good exercise. I’ll keep it for a while to see if I can become better at using WM’s versus DE’s.
Oh, BTW, I started with Butterknife 0.2.16 and just chose the no DE or WM, option 0. Everything else got pulled in after I cloned the repo for Debian-Hyprland and installed/built it.
