Must have

Must have

This page documents software that is strongly recommended to have running for a smooth Hyprland experience.

DEs like Plasma or GNOME will take care of this automatically. Hyprland will not, as you might want to use something else.

A notification daemon

Starting method: most likely manual (exec-once)

Many apps (e.g. Discord) may freeze without one running.

Examples: dunst, mako, and swaync.

Pipewire

Starting method: Automatic on systemd, manual otherwise.

Pipewire is not necessarily required, but screensharing will not work without it.

Install pipewire and wireplumber (not pipewire-media-session).

Non-systemd distros

Since there is no truly standardized way (outside of systemd) to load PipeWire when starting a graphical shell,1 non-systemd distros like Gentoo or Artix provide a dedicated launcher.

It can be usually found by running whereis <distro>-pipewire-launcher. If such a file does not exist on your install, please refer to your distro’s documentation for help.

XDG Desktop Portal

Starting method: Automatic on systemd, manual otherwise.

XDG Desktop Portal handles a lot of stuff for your desktop, like file pickers, screensharing, etc.

See the Hyprland Desktop Portal Page.

Authentication Agent

Starting method: manual (exec-once)

Authentication agents are the things that pop up a window asking you for a password whenever an app wants to elevate its privileges.

Our recommendation is the KDE one. For arch, it’s polkit-kde-agent.

You can autostart it with exec-once=/usr/lib/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1. On some distributions you might have to use a different path /usr/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 or /usr/libexec/kf5/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1.

On other distributions that use a more recent version, such as Gentoo, it may be necessary to use exec-once=/usr/lib64/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 instead.

Qt Wayland Support

Starting method: none (just a library)

Install qt5-wayland and qt6-wayland.