I also use River. I’d say most Hyprland setups are generic and low-quality (what you’d call “slop”) but if it floats your boat go for it.
I think possibly Reddit might have more setups similar to yours, given that Lemmy is smaller. I still see people use the various X11 WMs and have more clean-looking Wayland setups, though, not sure where you’ve been looking.
If you just want inspiration, just look for like, anything other than Hyprland. Maybe you could search for BSD since I’ve never seen a BSD setup with Hyprland or all these flashy effects.













The main disadvantage is that it’s less automated, and also you don’t get automatic updates without any other package management system in place. If you’re using something like e.g. source packages from the AUR then that solves both those problems and there’s no downsides (beyond extra computational power/time you spend waiting) so long as the package maintainer does their job correctly.
Not… really? I guess if you’re downloading random tarballs off the internet and running make install without checking the integrity or trustworthiness of what you’re downloading then you could get a virus. But if you’re certain the source you’re getting is legitimate, then I suppose the only way building from source could “mess up your system” is if you mess up your system libraries or something whilst trying to install dependencies.