[scottjones]

When Hyprland has no GPU driver to draw with, Mesa falls back to llvmpipe and every animated frame is drawn on the CPU, so animations stutter and keep a core busy. This turns animations, blur and shadows off for any session whose GL renderer is llvmpipe, softpipe or "Software Rasterizer", the names Hyprland itself checks since hyprwm/Hyprland#16343 (backported in omacom/omarchy-pkgs#649). That covers Macs whose GPU isn't driven yet, VMs and broken drivers.

Hyprland doesn't tell its config or hyprctl which renderer it got, so at session start Omarchy asks Mesa on the GPU Aquamarine made primary (the first AQ_DRM_DEVICES entry that exists, then the GPU with the built-in panel, then the boot GPU), reloads with the lighter defaults and logs one journal line. Those defaults load before ~/.config/hypr, so looknfeel.lua can still turn animations or blur back on, and the Glassy toggles leave blur off.

Appearance > Animations On brings them back in such a session and remembers that for later sessions (~/.local/state/omarchy/toggles/animations-without-gpu); turning animations off clears it. The menu rows and omarchy toggle animations read the state the session is actually in, so neither claims animations are on when they aren't. A notice explains it once per machine, and not at all in a VM, whose installer already turns animations off.

Tested on an M3 Air forced onto llvmpipe for one session (Hyprland's own log said Renderer: llvmpipe): animations, blur and shadows went off, including with the Glassy bar on, turning animations and blur on in looknfeel.lua kept both on, and the notice showed. The toggle, GPU-order and once-only notice changes on top are covered by test/shell.d/hyprland-software-rendering-test.sh and test/shell.d/toggle-test.sh in CI; they haven't been run on hardware. Not tested: multi-GPU machines (including NVIDIA hybrids) and VMs.

A possible follow-up is exposing Hyprland's isSoftware() through hyprctl upstream, which would replace the Mesa probe and its guess at which GPU Hyprland picked.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[greptile-apps]

Confidence Score: 5/5

[Medium impact] The PR appears safe to merge; the previous findings are fixed and no new actionable issues were found.

Summary

The PR turns off animations, blur and shadows when Hyprland renders on the CPU, while keeping personal settings and remembered choices.

• Hyprland drops costly effects when Mesa renders frames on the CPU.
• Appearance can keep animations on in later software-rendered sessions.

_{Reviews (4) · Last reviewed commit: "Ask Hyprland whether animations are on i..." · Reviewed by Greptile}