Hyprland Premium
75 comments
·June 21, 2025hd4
__s
Drew DeVault detailed that your Discord experience is not unusual
dekapan
[flagged]
perching_aix
> JFYI, any criticism directed by that person [(Drew DeVault)] should be taken with a massive shovel of salt
Just like any other person's if they fail to illustrate their points, preventing you from making your own judgement whether you agree with them or not. At a quick glance, that post doesn't lack this.
DaSHacka
[flagged]
d_tr
> sway is not far off in quality
You mean it is better or worse in your experience?
pancsta
Sway is way more stable, just less eye candy (which is great). Hyperland is practically a fork (wlroots) by a single dev.
hd4
didn't use sway for long enough to form an opinion. it did feel kind of workhorse-ish and boring which in hindsight is probably better. I was curious to see what I would get on a fairly old (intel iGPU) machine in terms of sheer performance with hyprland given it is fully GPU-accelerated through OpenGL and it was refreshing honestly. it's easy to see how they thought they could monetize it, pure looks and raw performance are very appealing to end-users.
the websites for both are a nice heuristic imo.
WD-42
This is the only DE/WM I have ever heard of having "premium" features. I don't have a problem with the developers trying to bring in some funding but this is bizarre.
I predict there is around a 0% chance that someone won't fork hyprland and implement the premium features themselves. Especially in this scene.
EgregiousCube
I'm going to sub because the lead dev is a college kid who's poured his heart and soul into this thing I use every day. It's really just a donation and I think it's good of him to try to monetize somehow.
NewJazz
I doubt anyone wants to touch/maintain hyprland. Niri and sway? Much more likely to see outside contributions IMO.
jckahn
And that's fine. The people who would use such a fork were never going to pay anyways.
boomskats
I really don't understand why all the lazy complaints about how the 'purchase a hyprland premium subscription' page doesn't provide an exhaustive explanation of what Hyprland is are top of this comments section. The homepage, at https://hypr.land, does that pretty well.
As for the move by the hyprland maintainers to go down this freemiumesque route (which I assume is why this link was actually posted and is top of HN), all I'll say is that Niri[0] is absolutely fantastic, and I expect it's about to get even more popular.
kjuulh
I've got absolutely no problem with them taking donations / having a premium option. But it is very difficult to comment on when there is no indication what the premium experience brings.
bjackman
I dunno if they changed the website since it was posted... But it literally lists exactly what you get?
(Basically, nothing, it's more or less a donation)
awkwardpotato
> Premium Desktop Experience (soon)
It doesn't explain what the "premium" desktop features will be or what it will include over standard Hyprland
dartharva
Dedicated (not community) support tends to generally be the default offering. Orion browser has the same: https://kagi.com/orion/orionplus.html
jegp
Great. If they can make some money out of this, why not?
I wonder what happens if they lock down some features as premium-only. The competition is tight in this space and there are tons of alternatives to Hyprland, like Sway, River, etc. Monetizing open-source code sounds like a dangerous path...
yencabulator
Niri is in the exact same style of smoothly animated tiled columns sliding around, and it's much more pleasant as a community/project. And if you care, it's in Rust not C++.
nextos
There's not a lot of competition yet.
Sway is good, but lots of fantastic WMs with great UIs are still stuck in X. Needing a massive re-write doesn't help.
My personal favorites (XMonad, StumpWM, and EXWM) have all tried but failed to get ported to Wayland.
arguflow
Tiling window managers on Wayland still are pretty early sadly.
yencabulator
I've been using Niri for a solid year, it's been great.
arguflow
Yeah I'm in the element chat of that. They are still pretty early.
arguflow
There needs to be more opinionated / zero configuration setups in the Linux desktop space. The PopOS! tiling mode is miles easier to setup.
Ghostty's popularity also seems to hit on those developers.
I really hope that Hyprand premium does magic with those insights.
skeptrune
+1 for the COSMIC tiling system
gausswho
I'm a big fan of Hyprland and have made a Fedora Atomic based setup using it across multple devices. I migrated from a few years of using Manjaro Sway. It feels streamlined and I really like how clean the configuration is - keeping multiple machines operating the same is mostly just syncing .config/hypr
This reminds me that I've been meaning to donate, but this page feels... unfinished? The links don't work and there's no explanation of what you get from premium.
KomoD
What does "Premium Desktop Experience" actually mean?
arguflow
I feel like they had to keep it in the incubator for a little longer but the idea of a zero config twm is a thing I could pay for if my config ever crashes and burns.
Beats being on Apple/Microsoft
Out_of_Characte
I do like hyprland, Its what I have installed. I hope they can offer 5$. of value to people with their 'premium' experience, I just think its either way too little or way too much additional support for what their price suggests.
Things that are close to this value proposition:
Video streaming services
Online game subscriptions
Data backups
VPN
Very few of these actually offer anything for 5$ a month and they do not offer 'customer support' or 'forum support' in the way you would probaly expect from people that offer that for your linux desktop. If anything, I expect the value proposition to be more like custom art pieces, where someone actually sits down with you for an hour, writes down what you want and programs up an entirely artisic desktop representation for whatever theme/idea you have. That would cost hundreds of dollars and would be a far better value proposition and the person in question could always be called upon for aftercare and newer projects.
throwing_away
Some context for anyone unfamiliar with the linux desktop space:
Hyprland is a "wayland compositor" (roughly analogous to an X Window Manager) that is under active community development: https://hypr.land
Wayland is considered the future of the linux desktop and is what projects like Valve's SteamDeck are using: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
It's known that Hyprland Premium is going to include a bunch of pre-made dotfiles including a Quickshell bar config, if you want to see the current top-tier rice: https://quickshell.outfoxxed.me/
jeroenvlek
I've been using Hyprland now for 4 months and it's my first tiling WM experience. I absolutely love it and actually donated 10 euro to the dev(s?).
Having said that: This is simply not mature enough yet to warrant a 60 euro a year subscription, regardless of premium features.
To be clear, I do see the potential and I would actually pay it but this is too early.
NewJazz
Hasn't Hyprland been in the works for years? Maybe try Niri or sway. Sway is rock solid IME.
trostaft
Premium support with a foss product seems like a win-win idea. Hope it goes well. Reminds me to donate to the stuff I use daily.
I've been using hyprland for about 6 months now, it's undeniably performant, buttery-smooth even but there are still a lot of paper cuts there - I have a feeling this will piss quite a few people off given the temperament in the Linux community for subscription-based software; also feel like it's not really the smartest thing to do if good alternatives already exist for what you're building (sway is not far off in quality)
Had to chuckle at the idea of hyprland support because the few times I had issues prior to this (with getting a nonstandard setup to work) I got made fun of on the discord which goes with the general vibe of getting support on discord so I wasn't mad at all, and eventually figured it out. The wiki does need a lot of work because I followed it and installing the recommended terminal emulator (kitty) was what caused a lot of hair pulling. Ghostty works far better.