I’ve been meaning to do this one for a while, because a bunch of you have been asking what I’m actually doing with my system—NixOS, Hyprland, and the whole tiling window manager workflow. So in this video I break down what a “desktop environment” really is (think GNOME, XFCE, MATE, etc.), and why Hyprland isn’t one of those. Hyprland is a Wayland compositor + tiling window manager, and in my setup it’s basically one piece of a custom desktop environment where I pick every component and configure it myself. I walk through what you see when you boot into my Hyprland config: Waybar at the top, SwayNC notifications, a normal system tray, and wallpapers handled by swww. Then I show where the magic actually lives—dotfiles and config folders—like animations, autostart, keybinds, and theming. A lot of the workflow is keyboard-driven (because that’s the point), but I also mention how I still use the mouse for moving/resizing windows because it works great. After that, I explain NixOS in plain English: declarative system config, easy reproducibility, huge package repo, and rollbacks via generations. Finally, I show how to reproduce my whole setup using my flake repo (ZaneyOS), including the gotchas like changing username/hostname and dealing with hardware-configuration.nix, plus why I recommend Home Manager for user-level config.