Four Linux distros that make Hyprland easy to try

Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that favors keyboard control over the mouse. Its main features include dynamic tiling layouts (dwindle or master-stack), built-in blur, shadows, animated windows and rounded corners, a single real-time Hyprland.conf for configuration, lightweight performance on older and modern hardware, and support for plugins.

Installing Hyprland can be challenging and default setups often feel basic. Several Arch-based distributions simplify the process and make the desktop accessible; each of the distributions below can be downloaded and used for free. StratOS delivers a visually striking Hyprland experience, offers GNOME and Niri editions, and includes an app showing important keyboard shortcuts.

It does not include an app store GUI by default, though Pamac can be added with the command: yay install pamac. Garuda’s Hyprland edition provides multiple themes, a Zen kernel, Btrfs snapshots and rollbacks, smooth Wayland animation and solid NVIDIA and AMD GPU support, but it expects modern hardware.

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