Missing font, not Hyprland, was behind broken Arch Linux minimal install
A developer building a minimal Arch Linux setup with Hyprland and the Kitty terminal found the graphical environment looked broken after installation. Rather than a compositor or driver issue, the root cause turned out to be the absence of a usable font package on the bare-bones system. Unlike typical desktop installations, which accumulate fonts and rendering libraries as indirect dependencies, this deliberately stripped-down setup exposed a gap most users never encounter. Adding GTK3 resolved the visual problems — not because Hyprland requires it, but because GTK3 pulled in a usable font set as a dependency. The episode highlights how Arch Linux's minimal, non-opinionated design can surface hidden assumptions that fuller desktop environments quietly satisfy.
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