Thank you a lot for that helpful and elaborate answer!

I used to be a tiling wm arch purist, even worked on a tiling wm called Awesome. Until one day my boss pointed out that all any dev wants is a terminal with splits and a full screen web browser. It was this moment I became enlightened

I second using a preconfig for Hyprland if you want to have something fancy and usable out of the box. You can build on top of that.

My system:

My waybar dotfiles. You can create/edit these files with whatever text editor you like, you don’t need the terminal. Please note that for some reason Lemmy screws up the “&” when pasting code… Please replace all “&” with “&”.

~/.config/waybar/config (note: remove custom/gpu-util if you don’t have a nvidia video card, or change the command to whatever is the AMD equivalent)

{
    "layer": "top",
    "position": "top",
    "modules-left": [
        "hyprland/workspaces"
    ],
    "modules-center": [
        "hyprland/window"
    ],
    "modules-right": [
        "cpu",
        "custom/gpu-util",
        "network#wifi",
        "pulseaudio",
        "clock",
        "tray",
        "custom/notification"
    ],
    "hyprland/workspaces": {
        "format": "{id}",
        "on-click": "activate",
        "sort-by": "number",
        "persistent-workspaces": {
            "*": 3
        },
        "all-outputs": false
    },
    "clock": {
        "format": "{:<span></span> %I:%M %p, %a %d}",
        "format-alt": "{:📅 %B %d, %Y}",
        "actions": {
            "on-click": "mode"
        },
        "tooltip": false
    },
    "cpu": {
        "interval": 5,
        "format": "<span>󰍛</span> {usage:2}%",
        "tooltip": false
    },
    "custom/gpu-util": {
        "exec": "echo $(nvidia-smi --query-gpu=utilization.gpu --format=csv,noheader,nounits)",
        "format": "<span>󰘚</span> {}%",
        "interval": 5,
        "tooltip": false
    },
    "network#wifi": {
        "interval": 1,
        "interface": "wlan0",
        "format-icons": [
            "󰤯",
            "󰤟",
            "󰤢",
            "󰤥",
            "󰤨"
        ],
        "format-wifi": "<span>{icon}</span> {signalStrength}%",
        "format-ethernet": "󰈀",
        "format-disconnected": "<span>󰤮 </span>",
        "tooltip": true,
        "tooltip-format-wifi": "<span>{icon}</span> {essid} ({signalStrength}%)"
    },
    "tray": {
        "spacing": 12
    },
    "pulseaudio": {
        "format": "<span>{icon}</span> {volume}%  {format_source}",
        "format-bluetooth": "<span>{icon}</span> {volume}%  {format_source}",
        "format-bluetooth-muted": "<span>󰖁</span>  {format_source}",
        "format-muted": "<span>󰖁</span>  {format_source}",
        "format-source": "<span></span> {volume}%",
        "format-source-muted": "<span></span>",
        "format-icons": {
            "headphone": "",
            "phone": "",
            "portable": "",
            "default": [
                "",
                "",
                ""
            ]
        },
        "on-click": "pavucontrol",
        "input": true
    },
    "custom/notification": {
        "tooltip": false,
        "format": "{icon} {}",
        "format-icons": {
            "notification": "<span></span><span><sup></sup></span>",
            "none": "",
            "dnd-notification": "<span></span><span><sup></sup></span>",
            "dnd-none": "",
            "inhibited-notification": "<span></span><span><sup></sup></span>",
            "inhibited-none": "",
            "dnd-inhibited-notification": "<span></span><span><sup></sup></span>",
            "dnd-inhibited-none": ""
        },
        "return-type": "json",
        "exec-if": "which swaync-client",
        "exec": "swaync-client -swb",
        "on-click": "sleep 0.1 &amp;&amp; swaync-client -t -sw",
        "escape": true
    },
    "hyprland/window": {
        "separate-outputs": true,
        "max-length": 100
    }
}

~/.config/waybar/style.css

/**
 * Global Colors
 */
@define-color bg #434C5E;
@define-color bg_lighter #546484;
@define-color fg #D8DEE9;
@define-color red_warn #BF616A;


/**
 * Global style
 */
* {
	font-size: 14px;
	font-family: JetBrains Mono Nerd Font, Font Awesome, sans-serif;
    font-weight: bold;
    border-radius: 5px;
    color: @fg;
    border: 0px;
}


/**
 *  Bar
 */
#waybar {
	background-color: rgba(46, 52, 64, 0.6);
    border-radius: 0;
}

/**
 * Default module styles
 */
#window,
#custom-packages,
#memory,
#clock,
#custom-gpu-util,
#cpu,
#gpu-util
#disk,
#battery,
#network,
#tray,
#pulseaudio,
#custom-notification {
    background: @bg;
    margin: 5px;
    padding: 2px 10px;
}


/**
 * WORKSPACES module specific style
 */
#workspaces {
	background: @bg;
    margin: 5px 3px 5px 12px;
    padding: 0px 2px;
    font-style: normal;
}

#workspaces button {
    padding: 0px 8px;
    margin: 4px;
    background-color: @bg_lighter;
    opacity: 0.7;
    transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
}

#workspaces button.active {
    background: @red_warn;
    min-width: 40px;
    transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
    opacity: 1.0;
}

#workspaces button:hover {
    background: @red_warn;
    opacity: 1.0;
}


/**
 * Tooltip style
 */
tooltip {
  background: @bg;
  border: 1px solid @bg_lighter;
  opacity: 0.9;
}

tooltip label {
  color: @fg;
}

Thanks a lot for your helpful comment! Looks very clean!

scrcpy is wonderful. I have some reading apps on my phone but at home I usually use my laptop with scrcpy to read.

I got this in my .custom_bash.sh:
#Connect to phone over Wifi and view phone screen.
#Remember to set static DHCP for the phone MAC.
#And to use the same one in the adb connect line.
function phoneconnect(){
sudo adb start-server
adb tcpip 2233
adb connect 192.168.18.15:2233
scrcpy
}

Thanks for your comment!

I would love to try, but never got used to workspaces and on a 14in laptop you never tile more than once horizontally, everything else is unusable with apps that have menus etc.

Same for me. It’s supposed to be on my ultra wide screen desktop PC, on my laptop I will stay on Gnome due to the clutter free UI and the ability to change workspaces. On the other hand, you switch workspaces with keyboard shortcuts and then utilize the small screen estate better.
^but those glorious gestures on Gnome tho…

A mix between tiling and floating is needed.

There’s a mockup/ plans somewhere for Gnome for dynamic tiling. The apps then tile and arrange themselves on their prefered sizes. That’s a reason why most core apps in Libadwaita need dynamic sidebars and stuff like that, that’s their preparation :)

I prefer many KDE apps, use all GNOME apps as Flatpaks, but Dolphin & Kate would pull in tons of dependencies.

I’m a bit torn apart. Dolphin for example feels more powerful, but I usually don’t need this much functionality and prefer simplicity. But, at least for my desktop PC, where I edit photos for example, and do more stuff in general, those previews of RAW images or plugins with installed apps are just god send. You can use Distrobox for that use case tho, here’s a link to a post I made a while ago: https://feddit.de/post/8018330
You can install Dolphin for example in that container, but keep your host minimal.

you need app systray icons, and I would also not want to live without the basic KDE systray features like volume, bluetooth, wifi. Those will just have way less features on TWMs I think.

You can still get very powerful setups on TWMs. There are a dozen of bars with all features you need.

Fedora has some Hyprland packages packaged, many more in a COPR. There is [github.com/secureblue/secureblue](secureblue with some TWMs) or the regular base github.com/wayblueorg/wayblue which has River, Hyprland, Sway and Wayfire images. Here people can work together to create a good experience out of the box.

I am already trying to incorporate my setup with Niri (the TWM) into said uBlue images to provide a fully functional TWM-DE. I’m just currently learning how to do that, and my past tries have failed for now in the last days. But I’m onto it.

Rofi is a good alternative to dmenu as well.

I already tried Polonium and didn’t like it. It really feels messy.

Forge/ PopShell are a bit better, but you still notice Mutter struggling with the extensions.

Same with PaperWM. Hence why I want to use Niri, which is pretty much PaperWM, but standalone.

You mean Git SCM/VCS? GitHub is a Microsoft-owned software forge. True that it has a lot of software hosted, but personally, I think they’re scummy. There’s are other alternatives, like Codeberg and GitLab. It shouldn’t matter what forge you’re using realistically, but ideologically, if you’re a copy-left hardliner, you might want to avoid them.

Yeah, correct. I know that Github isn’t perfect due to MSs’ ownership, but for now, it’s the biggest. I also have a codeberg account, but I haven’t used it yet.
I try to make a custom uBlue-image (immutable Fedora spin project), and for that, Github is the official method.
But I will look around if Codeberg or other Git platforms work too at the moment.
Does Codeberg also have an automatic building system/ Github actions?

You don’t really need to use a tiling window.

Sure I don’t need to, but I want to try it.
I am a huge Gnome fan and wanted to try a WM for a longer time now. Now, Niri has released, and I couldn’t find an already made image yet, so I decided to do it myself. For me, a big part is the learning experience. I finally have enough time for that now and to invest some of it for that project :)