Six channels, and the right one depends mostly on your distribution. Everything below installs the
same x86_64 binary; on any other architecture, build from source.

What it needs first

Two dependencies are optional and each costs you only the thing it provides: without an installed
icon set every window shows the built-in placeholder, and without notify-send problems are
reported on standard error only. Hyprland itself is deliberately not declared as a package
dependency — pinning a compositor version in a package would refuse installs the program supports.

Verify what you downloaded

Every release publishes a SHA256SUMS file covering all of its artefacts. Before installing
anything from the releases page:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives

sudo apt install ./hypr-swap_<version>_amd64.deb

Installing the .deb through apt rather than dpkg -i is what pulls in libcairo2,
libpango-1.0-0, libpangocairo-1.0-0, libglib2.0-0, libxkbcommon0 and libc6 for you. libnotify-bin is a recommendation,
so it comes along by default and can be declined.

The package is built in a container of the oldest still-supported Ubuntu LTS, so one package
runs across that family’s currently supported releases — it is verified on that oldest release, on
the current Ubuntu LTS, and on Debian stable before each release is published.

Fedora, RHEL and derivatives

sudo dnf install ./hypr-swap-<version>-1.x86_64.rpm

Requires cairo and pango; libnotify is a suggestion. Built in a container of the oldest
supported Fedora release and verified there and on the current one.

Arch

Two packages, and you want exactly one of them. Neither is on the AUR yet — the AUR has paused
new account registration, so they cannot be created there for now. Until it reopens, both recipes
install from this repository with makepkg, which does what a helper would have done for you:

git clone https://github.com/SerafAC/hypr-swap.git
cd hypr-swap/packaging/aur/hypr-swap-bin   # or hypr-swap, to compile instead
makepkg -si

Take the recipe from the default branch, not from a release tag: the release workflow rewrites
pkgver and sha256sums after the tag is cut, so the branch carries the recipe for the newest
release and the tag carries the one before it. What you get is an ordinary package — pacman -Qi hypr-swap, pacman -R hypr-swap — built from the same published artefacts and checked against the
same digests as the AUR copy will be. The one thing you lose by not going through a helper is the
update: git pull and re-run makepkg -si.

Once both packages are on the AUR, the whole of the above becomes one line:

paru -S hypr-swap        # compiles the release's source
paru -S hypr-swap-bin    # installs the release's binary

hypr-swap builds from source, which takes a couple of minutes and needs a Rust toolchain that
your helper installs as a build dependency and can remove afterwards. hypr-swap-bin installs
the x86_64 binary the release already published — nothing is compiled and no toolchain is
involved. Pick that one unless you have a reason to build it yourself.

They install identical files, and each declares the other as a conflict, so switching between them
is an ordinary replace rather than something you have to clean up by hand. Anything that depends on
hypr-swap is satisfied by either.

Neither builds from the default branch: both name a published release, so there is an integrity
value to check, and both have their pkgver and sha256sums rewritten by the release workflow
from the artefacts it has just published — a recipe cannot fall behind the release. The prebuilt
one installs the binary unmodified, so what lands in /usr/bin is byte-for-byte the file whose
checksum is in SHA256SUMS. optdepends on both names libnotify and an icon set.

The prebuilt binary

For a distribution with no package of its own, and for trying it without installing anything:

curl -LO https://github.com/SerafAC/hypr-swap/releases/latest/download/SHA256SUMS
curl -LO https://github.com/SerafAC/hypr-swap/releases/latest/download/hypr-swap-<version>-x86_64
sha256sum -c --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
chmod +x hypr-swap-<version>-x86_64
sudo install -Dm755 hypr-swap-<version>-x86_64 /usr/local/bin/hypr-swap

You supply cairo, pango, pangocairo, glib and xkbcommon yourself — nothing checks for them until
the daemon starts, and a missing one shows up as a dynamic-link failure.

From source

The supported path on every architecture and distribution that has no package:

git clone https://github.com/SerafAC/hypr-swap.git
cd hypr-swap
cargo build --release
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/hypr-swap /usr/local/bin/hypr-swap

You need the cairo, pango, pangocairo and xkbcommon development packages, not just the runtime
libraries — libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libxkbcommon-dev on Debian family,
cairo-devel cairo-gobject-devel pango-devel libxkbcommon-devel on Fedora (cairo’s pkg-config file
for GObject is a separate subpackage there), cairo pango libxkbcommon on Arch. Building the
project as a contributor, rather than installing it, is
DEVELOPMENT.md’s subject.

Where each channel puts things

No package installs a unit file, registers a service, or drops a configuration file. The daemon is
started by your own hyprland.conf and runs perfectly well with no configuration at all.

After installing

Nothing runs yet — the daemon needs to be started and given two key combinations. That is
binding the shortcuts, and it is two lines. If something looks wrong afterwards,
troubleshooting covers the failures that turn out not to be bugs.