Guan Lian

I was drawn to Hyprland (specifically Omarchy Linux) because I really dislike cluttered desktop environments, and I’ve been using it quite intensively for about a month now.

At first, I assumed that a DCC application like Houdini, with all its floating windows and panels, would be a terrible fit for a tiling window manager. But after having an AI agent help me solve a bunch of small issues, I was surprised to find that the overall experience is actually very good.

For example, since essentially any Houdini panel can be detached into its own window, Hyprland’s window-management model becomes surprisingly useful. You can hold Meta and drag with the right mouse button from anywhere inside the active window to resize it in any direction, which makes reading information-heavy layouts—especially in LOPs—a bit easier.

You can also send specific windows to an overlay layer and bring them up with a shortcut whenever you need them, almost like casually checking a social media app.

And all of this is already working under XWayland. If Houdini ever gets proper native Wayland support, I think I’d be very happy indeed.

Houdini 22 no longer provides a Qt 5 build, but I’ve been able to use it on Wayland without issues by adding the following lines to houdini.env:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb
QT_XCB_NO_XI2=1

Hey friend, I’ve been working with a Qt5-built Houdini on Fedora 43 under Wayland for several days now. The issues that used to bother me—such as the mouse wheel not working in the network editor and parameters disappearing when scrolling in the parameter pane—are all gone. I don’t know exactly what fixed them or who was responsible. I only know that I’m no longer encountering these problems, and I hope this information is helpful to you.