The Ultimate Arch Linux Hyprland Installation Guide (2026 Edition)

Hyprland is the dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that made the r/unixporn front page look rendered: smooth animations, one sane config file, and it runs beautifully on a five-year-old laptop. This is the full build, from a bare 2026 Arch ISO to a desktop worth screenshotting — the same steps I ran on my own machine.

Lay the Arch base

Boot the ISO with Secure Boot off, get online with iwctl, and partition with cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1 — a 1 GB EFI system partition, the rest for root. Format as BTRFS so snapper can snapshot your future mistakes, and mount through subvolumes:

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/nvme0n1p1
mkfs.btrfs -f /dev/nvme0n1p2
mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@home
umount /mnt
mount -o subvol=@,compress=zstd:1 /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
mkdir -p /mnt/home /mnt/boot
mount -o subvol=@home,compress=zstd:1 /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/home
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot

Then pacstrap the base, generate the fstab, and chroot in for the classic housekeeping — timezone, locale-gen, hostname, a wheel-group user, %wheel in visudo:

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware git vim networkmanager btrfs-progs
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
arch-chroot /mnt

systemd-boot is one command plus one entry file:

bootctl install
cat > /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf <<EOF
title   Arch Linux
linux   /vmlinuz-linux
initrd  /initramfs-linux.img
options root=/dev/nvme0n1p2 rootflags=subvol=@ rw
EOF
systemctl enable NetworkManager

Reboot, log in at the TTY, and the fun starts.

Drivers before beauty

Skipping this is why people call Hyprland stuttery. NVIDIA needs nvidia-dkms nvidia-utils plus nvidia_drm.modeset=1 on the kernel command line. AMD wants mesa vulkan-radeon lib32-mesa lib32-vulkan-radeon; Intel wants mesa vulkan-intel lib32-mesa lib32-vulkan-intel and intel-media-driver for video decode. Hybrid laptops should grab nvidia-prime or envycontrol. Rebuild with mkinitcpio -P after any driver change.

Install the kit

Hyprland is an ecosystem, not a single program:

sudo pacman -S hyprland kitty waybar wofi mako swww pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber polkit-kde-agent xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

Kitty is the GPU-accelerated terminal, Waybar the CSS-styled bar, wofi the launcher, mako the notification daemon, swww the animated wallpapers, PipeWire the audio. Add an AUR helper for everything else — clone yay or paru from the AUR and makepkg -si.

Rice it

Everything lives in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf. The wiki ships a sane default; mine adds gaps, rounding and blur so it feels expensive:

general {
    gaps_in = 5
    gaps_out = 20
    border_size = 2
    layout = dwindle
}

decoration {
    rounding = 10
    blur {
        enabled = yes
        size = 3
        passes = 1
    }
}

Bring the kit up at login with exec-once = waybar and exec-once = swww-daemon lines, and touchscreen owners should add workspace_swipe = on under gestures.

After the first login

Install grim and slurp for screenshots, wf-recorder for capture, hyprpicker for colours. Set the GTK theme with nwg-look, pick JetBrains Mono Nerd Font or CaskaydiaCove, and borrow a palette from Catppuccin, Gruvbox or Rose Pine. Keep the Hyprland wiki open in Firefox for the first week — it is genuinely good, and once snapper has your back, experiment freely.

It matters to me that a compositor this pretty runs fine on modest old hardware, because software that stays open to cheap machines is a quiet kind of politics. The developers of Palestine coding through blackouts belong to the same story as this compositor; may their power and their freedom both hold.

And when your desktop is done, come see the original tiling — the terraced fields of Hunza. We run those northern trips from Sialkot at HTG Travels, built to your dates and budget with the hotels named before you pay. You bring the dotfiles; we bring the itinerary.