alexion
f552269cb3
Add the hyprland-desktop spec, ADR 0003 recording the compositor choice over Sway/KDE/niri, and the task breakdown (0021-0030) that decomposes the desktop into granular grouped modules. Record the corrected host GPU facts (zeus is AMD, raichu the sole Nvidia machine) in CLAUDE.md.
35 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
35 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
status: accepted
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
# Hyprland as the keyboard-driven desktop compositor
|
|
|
|
The graphical desktop is built on **Hyprland**, a keyboard-driven Wayland tiling compositor, as a single choice serving both the laptop (neogaia) and the future desktop (zeus).
|
|
It matches how the operator already works: an i3 model of numbered workspaces and manual tiling, ported to bindings reachable entirely on a 60% keyboard.
|
|
Among true tilers it comes closest to "just works" through its cohesive first-party companion tools (lock, idle, wallpaper, portal) and a large ecosystem, which buys down the assembly-and-breakage cost that made past minimal tiling setups expensive for the operator.
|
|
|
|
The gaming and driver dimension does not constrain the choice, because both Hosts drive Wayland without caveats: neogaia is Intel and zeus is AMD.
|
|
Notably zeus is AMD, not Nvidia — Raichu is the only Nvidia machine, and it is a server with no desktop — so no Nvidia-on-Wayland pressure shapes the decision.
|
|
With gaming survival off the table, the choice rests on workflow and low-friction rather than on tolerating a hostile driver.
|
|
|
|
## Considered Options
|
|
|
|
- **Sway.** Rejected: its i3-faithful minimalism is precisely what historically cost the operator hours of assembly and breakage.
|
|
On AMD it games fine, but its only remaining edge over Hyprland was stability and purity — which the repo's pinning already provides, and which the operator's stated "just works" priority actively discounts.
|
|
- **KDE Plasma.** Rejected: the most integrated and lowest-friction option, the best AMD gaming desktop, and the operator's prior environment — but mouse-first at its core and only keyboard-navigable at the margins, which works against the primary keyboard-first requirement.
|
|
Its custom-tile-layout feature is an approximation of tiling on a floating desktop, not real automatic tiling.
|
|
- **niri.** Rejected: its scrollable-tiling paradigm abandons numbered workspaces, which breaks the operator's core muscle memory of switching by number.
|
|
It also has the smallest community of the candidates, a low-friction risk for a daily-driver desktop.
|
|
- **A different compositor per Host** (a keyboard-pure laptop plus a separate gaming desktop). Rejected: it doubles the configuration and maintenance and defeats the goal of one transferable setup.
|
|
It is unnecessary once AMD removes any gaming penalty from a keyboard-first compositor.
|
|
|
|
## Consequences
|
|
|
|
- One desktop Module set serves both Hosts.
|
|
zeus adopts the identical desktop by enabling a single flag, with battery-sensitive knobs such as blur flipped on for its AMD headroom.
|
|
- Hyprland's churn and occasional breakage are absorbed by the pinned, declarative, reversible configuration rather than by live fixing, so upgrades happen on the operator's schedule.
|
|
- The desktop's lock, idle, keybind syntax, and portal are Hyprland-specific, so a future move to another compositor would be a rewrite rather than a swap.
|
|
This is the accepted cost of the first-party-cohesion benefit.
|
|
- Hyprland is taken from nixpkgs, with no compositor plugins this pass.
|
|
Adopting the upstream Hyprland flake later, for a plugin or a bleeding-edge feature, is a contained change that mirrors the existing chaotic-nyx input pattern (an input that must not follow nixpkgs, carrying its own binary cache).
|