My Return To Qtile
For the vast majority of 2025, I was a very happy Hyprland user. In fact, there is so much about Wayland and Hyprland specifically that I really enjoy, that if you’d asked me a few weeks ago if I’d ever switch back to X11, I’d have said absolutely not.
The thing is, this is Hyprland we’re talking about. And while it has gotten way better than it had been when it comes to stability, it isn’t perfect. No software is, of course, but the Hyprland devs seem to be a little more prone to breaking shit than most others are. In September, I switched from NixOS stable to Unstable, and it had been very good for me. I had vague plans of switching back to stable in November when the new release came out, but I pushed that back because unstable was so good.
Then I went to update about a week ago, and Hyprland would not update at all. I asked around, and the best I could come up with was two responses of “RTFM” and one of “It must be you, because mine is fine.” Those were very helpful responses.
So, I figured that I’d use my misfortune to switch back to stable. Hyprland would be on a more stable version, and I’d be happy again. Turns out I was a fool. Hyprland worked okay on NixOS stable, but when I walked away and my computer when to sleep, I’d come back to Hyprland in “safe mode,” something I had no clue even existed.
I did try to troubleshoot it, but I couldn’t get the logs to capture the issue and journalctl was similarly unhelpful. I spent a few hours doing some searching, but I didn’t really find anything that was all that helpful. Sleep bugs are horrendous to reproduce. Now, I could have gone to Hyprland’s Git repo, and filed a bug. Normal people would do that, but I don’t do that. I did that once, was told to not use NVIDIA anymore, which was silly as I don’t use NVIDIA, and that was that. I seem to hold a bit of a grudge.
Anyway, long and rambly story short, I’m back on Qtile.
Now, back in 2023, I wrote about how awesome Qtile was. I’ve loved Qtile for a long time, but Hyprland won me over with more features and some of that special Wayland sauce. And I had some Xorg related problems on Qtile before my switch, so I hadn’t ever really thought about going back to Qtile long term. But with Hyprland being a bitch on my system, Qtile called me home.
And I was right in 2023. Qtile is Effin’ Awesome!
First off, I had forgotten how good the bar is. I love Qtile’s bar. It may not be the most customizable bar ever, but it is very extensible, and I find it just a cozy experience to use. It has gotten even better since the last time I used it as now you can easily create a script widget, meaning you can put basically anything right up in the bar. Way cool.
I also have to say that I love that Qtile is configured in Python. Python was my first language, and despite the fact that I’ve moved on to Rust for a bit, I still love Python. It has its quirks, for sure, but I would argue that it is one of the better languages out there simply because it is very easy to learn. I’ve had way more problems with Rust than I did with Python once I decided to finally sit down and work at it.
Qtile being in Python, means that I can do basically anything I want with it. My next plan is to actually rewrite the GroupBox widget so that it can display many colors depending on the status of a workspace. I’ve already spent some time making my configuration very modular.
The modular part of it was important because I’ve spent the last week ricing. A lot. I have 175 different themes to choose from now. I may have went a little overboard. That’s 40 color schemes, each with 5 different layouts (plus a few extras). I will probably add more. I’ve also upgraded my theme switcher script so that I can choose a random theme.
Needless to say, I’ve had loads of fun coming back to Qtile. Will I stay here forever? I doubt it. Something else will catch my eye. Maybe I’ll return to Hyprland. Maybe Niri will finally get good. Maybe MangoWC will mature. I like moving around. But Qtile will always hold the number one spot in my heart.
Happy Holidays!