This might be a letdown for Hyprland enthusiasts, a favorite among fans of eye-pleasing tiling window compositors, who’ve been looking forward to the upcoming Debian 13 release, but unfortunately, it is what it is.
In a noteworthy development, the Debian Release Team recently removed the Hyprland ecosystem from its upcoming 13 “Trixie” release. Simon McVittie, a Debian developer, initiated this removal; more precisely, it’s worth noting that the removal affects the Debian testing branch.
As you know, the current testing branch is what becomes the next stable release, once all the bugs have been worked out. So, if any packages are removed from testing, they won’t make it into the final stable version—in this case, Debian 13.
The affected packages include key components of the Hyprland ecosystem, such as “hyprland-protocols,” “hyprlang,” “hyprutils,” “hyprwayland-scanner,” “hyprcursor,” and “xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland.” And let me clarify right away -there’s no drama behind why they were removed. Here’s the situation.
Hyprland is under very active development, with new features rolling out all the time. However, older versions don’t get long-term support, which makes them a poor fit for a stable Debian release—where long-term stability and reliability are absolutely essential. According to Debian devs:
Our current version is lagging behind upstream by a couple versions and it would not be possible to support it during the life time of Trixie.
So if you’re looking to use Hyprland on Debian right now, you’ll need to switch over to its SID edition.
As I mentioned earlier, the fast pace of ongoing development and the steady stream of new features make Hyprland a great fit for any rolling-release Linux distro. But when it comes to LTS releases, where stability and guaranteed bug fixes for older versions are key, Hyprland doesn’t seem to deliver on that front yet.
For more information, refer to Debian’s mailing list.
