A while back I conducted the fourth Hyprland census, and got some interesting replies.

As is tradition, I will sum up the results and give my own comments in a small blogpost.

We've gotten 2x more replies this time, thank you to everyone who participated!

Demographics

As usual, we start with the demographics.

Literally nothing changed here, as usual. I am catering with my software to young dudes, it seeems. :P

Distro

This is the first new question. It seems over half of the users run Arch, which is not that much of a surprise. The clear 2nd place is Nix, which is evident from the discussions and bug reports. I am surprised though that Arch + Arch-based + Nix are 85% of all responses, though.

Finding Hyprland

This is a question that has been shifting from the very beginning. In the first census, the vast majority was r/unixporn users. However, as time went on, this has been decreasing, and we see the trend continuing.

r/unixporn is down from 44% last time to 32% this time, and youtube has grown from 22% to 33%. This is expected, as youtube is a massive platform compared to r/unixporn, and thus is able to reach more people.

Usage

Not much has changed on this front, with about 70% of people claiming they solely use Hyprland.

This is expected. Not everyone can use Hyprland, Wayland, or even Linux as a daily driver just yet.

Reasons

As usual, let me highlight some reasons people put in the "why not?" box.

Because it doesn't support Linux mint

Heh. And it likely won't. Deps too old.

I do dual boot Windows bcz kernel level ACs

Typical, and unfortunate.

Long setup of defaults

Defaults are the opposite of setting up... they are defaults?

I don't have time to configure it

Valid reason not to use Hyprland, though there are maaany pre-built ready-to-download dotfile repos nowadays, why not try them out?

Because it isn't very good for gaming

Odd one, I play cs all the time and don't really face issues.

Generally there were waaay to many comments to reply to all of them, but most of them are external reasons, or Hyprland not catering to the particular user - which is fine.

Versions

Another new question - that shows that many of my users are adventurous and like living on the edge with latest -git :P

Plugins

Also a new question - what surprises me is that over 30% of people use plugins! I thought it would've been more like 10, but hey, apparently it was a very good idea to make that plugin system as y'all enjoy it :)

hyprpm

We see a few hotspots - 10, 8, and 5. Likely suggests that hyprpm sometimes just won't work. Unfortunately, that happens, but the cases are rare and I try to minimize them.

Best part of Hyprland

Surprisingly without changes on this front. The results are almost the same as last time.

Worst part of Hyprland

Same story here, although "difficult to say" and "there is none" gained a bit, taking away from the dozens of random answers people put in the "other" box.

Development focus

Now this is a big change compared to last time. Very big.

Bugfixes have shrunk from 30% to 27%, that's more-or-less stable. However, features have plummeted from 26% to 11%, and making me polite has gone from 17% to just 9%.

What has gained a TON, is the ecosystem. Although "ecosystem" wasn't really an option on the last survey, we can clearly see that people by "features", seem to mean "small apps, utilities, configs to make hyprland more of a DE".

Supporting the growth

Not much has changed on this front when it comes to percentages.

Satisfaction

As with every survey, we are slowly shifting right :)

"10" is up from 8% to 18%.

Why Hyprland and not something else

Not much has changed here, either. Seems most of you really like your animations.

HyprDE?

This is a question I put to gather public opinion about a DE. That's it. I won't say anything else.

Drama

As you can guess, this is a new question. It's quite surprising only 9% say it has had a negative impact on their view of Hyprland as a piece of software. I would've expected more, honestly, based on the very mixed opinions online. Maybe it's overblown, who knows.

Conclusion

We ballin'.

Take it as you will, but seems like Hyprland is still a very healthy project and it makes me glad I can be leading a piece of software so many people enjoy using daily :)

See you next time!