The Biggest Hyprland Release in Two Years
If you've been running Arch (btw) with Hyprland as your Wayland compositor, you already know what Vaxry and the team have been building toward for the last several release cycles. Hyprland 0.55, released on May 9, 2026, finally delivers what the community has been demanding: a proper scripting layer for configuration and a Layout API that lets you define custom window arrangements without touching C++. These aren't minor quality-of-life tweaks — they fundamentally change what Hyprland is capable of.
For everyone still locked to X11 and i3, waiting for "a good reason" to switch to Wayland: this is it.
Lua Config: Hyprlang Gets Its Retirement Notice
The defining change in 0.55 is the transition to Lua as the primary configuration language. Hyprlang — Hyprland's bespoke config DSL — served its purpose, but it's always been limited: no real scripting, no clean conditionals, no reusable abstractions. Lua fixes all of that in one shot.
The migration path is non-breaking for now. Your existing `hyprland.conf` files continue to work — Hyprlang support isn't being yanked yet. But the writing is on the wall. The new Layout API is Lua-only. New features are being built in Lua. If you're setting up Hyprland for the long term, start learning Lua. It's a small, battle-tested language, and it opens doors Hyprlang never could.
The Layout API specifically lets you define custom tiling layouts that behave exactly like built-in ones — applied globally, per workspace, or per monitor. No more contorting Dwindle or Master to approximate the window arrangement you actually want. Define it yourself, in config, without recompiling anything.
Display and Color: Your Monitor Is Finally a First-Class Citizen
Hyprland 0.55 adds per-output ICC profile support via the `icc = "path"` config setting. Each monitor in a multi-display setup loads its own color profile independently. If you've been running a calibrated professional display next to a gaming monitor and watching colors look wrong on one or both, this is the fix. It's functionality that X11 compositors have fumbled for a decade.
Color management goes deeper too: FP16 precision and enhanced color pipelines are now enabled by default for color-managed displays. Combine this with the existing Wayland color-management protocol support and you have a compositor doing color correctly at a level that embarrasses most X11 setups. HDR workflow on Linux just got meaningfully better.
Scrolling, Input, and Five New Window Management Additions
The scrolling overhaul in 0.55 deserves attention: fullscreen windows are now included in scrolling workspaces by default, native trackpad gestures are exposed through the Lua `scroll_move` API, and new flags — `expel`, `consume`, `consume_or_expel`, `auto_consuming`, `wrapping` — give fine-grained control over how windows interact in scrollable layouts. If you've been curious about the scrollable-tiling paradigm that niri popularized, Hyprland now speaks that language natively.
Window management gets device tags, the `confine_pointer` window rule, the `move_into_or_create_group` dispatcher, `rotatesplit` for the Dwindle layout, live pinch cursor zoom, and a glow window decoration. Five separate window management additions in a single release. The development velocity here is genuinely impressive for an independent project with no corporate backing.
35,700 Stars: Hyprland Has Won the Compositor Wars
Let's be direct about where things stand: Hyprland has won. With 35.7k GitHub stars — nearly 50% more than niri in second place, and more than river, wayfire, and wlroots combined — it is the de facto standard for custom Wayland desktop builds in 2026. The project that started as Vaxry's hobby repo in 2022 now ships features that KDE and GNOME roadmaps are chasing.
The fork from wlroots to the Aquamarine backend in 2024 was the correct call, and 0.55's color pipeline improvements prove it. Features like per-output ICC and FP16 color management would have been impossible to iterate on at this speed inside the wlroots contribution model. Independence has a cost, but the release cadence justifies it.
Breaking Changes: Read Before You Upgrade
A word of warning before you run `pacman -Syu`: 0.55 removes `dwindle:pseudotile`, `decoration:shadow:ignore_window`, and `render:cm_fs_passthrough`. The `misc:vfr` setting moves under the `debug:` namespace. If any of these appear in your config, the compositor will error on startup. Check the migration guide — it's short and clearly documented — before you upgrade a daily driver.
The removal of `pseudotile` specifically in favor of the new Layout API is the correct architectural decision. Hyprland has never been shy about breaking legacy config for correctness, and the ecosystem is stronger for it. I use Arch, btw — I upgraded within the hour. Zero issues with the migration.
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