Beats being on Apple/Microsoft
I predict there is around a 0% chance that someone won't fork hyprland and implement the premium features themselves. Especially in this scene.
(Basically, nothing, it's more or less a donation)
It doesn't explain what the "premium" desktop features will be or what it will include over standard Hyprland
I have no idea what "Hyperland" is.
Which has a demo. This website seems to only be for the account / payments.
If you're still not sure, you're simply not the target audience, these things almost always require further learning and customization, so some level of gate-keeping from the start is helpful.
But also, OP posted a link that is not mobile friendly (at least on safari) and doesn’t say much about what this is. The main page does a fine job though (for those would care I guess).
I think a common response is that if you don’t know, you’re not the audience anyways. But that lops off your customer funnel and limits the general awareness of your product. You want to bring everyone one step closer to your product from wherever they are.
For projects like this that come with some assembly required, having a light filter on your funnel can actually be beneficial. Cast too wide of a net and you collect a lot of people who aren’t qualified to use the product but expect a lot of support anyway.
Arch, not Ubuntu.
..but they've been really successful in their niche..
maybe your intuition is off?
Not everything is trying to be the next iPhone.
Ghostty's popularity also seems to hit on those developers.
I really hope that Hyprand premium does magic with those insights.
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.
Related:
https://dmpwn.info/ (Brief overview of problematic content and opinions Drew Devault associates with)
You mean it is better or worse in your experience?
the websites for both are a nice heuristic imo.
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.
I have no experience with owning a product but I assume that if donations don't succeed you have to opt for these methods
Most people would just use kde or gnome which have their own compositors.
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.
> I fondly remember GNOME 2 days. It was the best Linux experience I've ever had.
You can just use MATE, which is just GNOME 2 forked and continued.
> KDE with infinite number of settings that put me into depression the moment I open their control panel
Okay, then don't do that. KDE's defaults are fine. The fact that options exist is not harmful to you.
> or those weird tiled WMs which I have zero interest in, because I almost never split my screen, all my windows are maximised 99% of time.
You can use i3/sway with
workspace_layout tabbed
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.
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.
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/
jegp•3h ago
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...
nextos•3h ago
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•3h ago