Hyprland Desktop Portal

An XDG Desktop Portal (later called XDP) is a program that lets other applications communicate swiftly with the compositor through D-Bus.

It’s used for stuff like e.g. opening file pickers, screen sharing.

On Wayland, it also requires an implementation. For Hyprland, you’d usually use xdg-desktop-portal-wlr (later called XDPW)

Unfortunately, due to various reasons the -wlr portal is inferior to the KDE or Gnome ones.

In order to bridge the gap, Hyprland has its own fork of XDPW that has more features, called xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland. (later called XDPH)

You don’t need XDPH. Hyprland will work with XDPW, but XDPH has more features, like e.g. window sharing.

XDPH will work on other wlroots-based compositors, although limited to the XDPW features (other will be disabled)

Installing

Arch Linux

pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

or, for -git:

yay -S xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland-git

Gentoo

Unmask dependencies

/etc/portage/profile/package.unmask

dev-qt/qtbase
dev-qt/qtwayland
dev-qt/qtdeclarative
dev-qt/qtshadertools

Apply necessary useflags

/etc/portage/package.use

dev-qt/qtbase opengl egl eglfs gles2-only
dev-qt/qtdeclarative opengl
sys-apps/xdg-desktop-portal screencast

Unmask dependencies and xdph

/etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

gui-libs/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland **
dev-qt/qtbase
dev-qt/qtwayland
dev-qt/qtdeclarative
dev-qt/qtshadertools

btw those are the useflags that I have tested, you could also test others.

Installation

eselect repository enable guru
emaint sync -r guru
emerge --ask --verbose gui-libs/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

Manual

See The Github repo’s readme.

It’s recommended to uninstall any other portal implementations to avoid conflicts with the -hyprland or -wlr ones.

-kde and -gnome are known to cause issues.

-kde is unfortunately a hard dep of plasma-integration in Arch Linux, so if using that, you’ll need to pacman -Rnsdd xdg-desktop-portal-kde.

both -wlr and -hyprland installed at once will also cause conflicts. Choose one and uninstall the other.

Usage

Should start automatically.

The most basic way of telling everything is OK is by trying to screenshare anything, or open OBS and select pipewire source. If XDPH is running, a qt menu will pop up asking you what to share.

If it doesn’t, and you get e.g. slurp, then XDPW is launching. In that case, try removing XDPW.

XDPH will work on other wlroots compositors, but features available only on Hyprland will not work (e.g. window sharing)

For a nuclear option, you can use this script and exec-once it:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1
killall xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland
killall xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
killall xdg-desktop-portal
/usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland &
sleep 2
/usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal &

adjust the paths if incorrect.

Debugging

If you get long app launch times, or screensharing does not work, consult the logs.

systemctl --user status xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

if you see a crash, it’s most likely you are missing qt6-wayland and/or qt5-wayland.

if you don’t, make sure you don’t have -kde or -gnome installed. Only -gtk will work with -hyprland or -wlr on Hyprland.