TL;DR: Hyprland 0.55 switched from Hyprlang to Lua, breaking everything. I spent days tweaking my setup, only for the dev to announce the change weeks after I felt it was finished . Switched to Niri in under 2 hours.

The Breaking Point

I was a Cybersecurity undergrad / Jr DevOps / part-time blogger / gamer with a perfect Hyprland setup. Then 0.55 dropped. Suddenly:

Config files broken

Plugins non-functional

Workspace rules gone

Days of debugging for nothing

The dev announced the Lua migration right after I thought I’d finally stabilized things. That was the signal to leave.

Why Niri?

Scrolling + tiling (no more manual window snapping)

Config based on my old Hyprland layout (easier migration)

Thanks to DankMaterialShell’s Quickshell + styling, I got a polished UI fast

Total migration time: <2 hours vs. weeks of Hyprland rewrites

The Tradeoff

Less community support right now (it’s newer)

Different workflow (scrolling vs. traditional tiling)

But honestly?…