When comparing Openbox vs Hyprland, the Slant community recommends Openbox for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop environments for Arch Linux?” Openbox is ranked 10th while Hyprland is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Openbox is:
Openbox is a lightweight window manager that uses a little over 100MB RAM upon boot.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extremely lightweight
Openbox is a lightweight window manager that uses a little over 100MB RAM upon boot.
Pro Stable
Openbox is used as a default window manager in few desktop environments so it offers more testing, more bugfixes, and more stable behavior.
Pro Highly configurable with a moderate learning curve
Configuring Openbox is very easy to carry out, simply by editing its few config files. There are programs that allow for an even easier means of editing these files by doing so in a UI.
Pro Uncluttered
Openbox does away with many traditional desktop elements, like menu buttons, bars, etc. and places everything in the (insanely customizable) context menu. If any of the missing pieces are desired, they can be added through others apps (e.g. tint2 for taskbar).
Pro Defaults easy to quickstart
Openbox's set of defaults are easily editable to the user's liking.
Pro Very well documented
Due to wide use and a long history, there is a lot of documentation available on the use and customization of Openbox.
Pro Smooth
Animations smoother than you can imagine.
Pro Uses wlroots
The best Wayland compositor library built on standards.
Pro Plugins
Has a plugin system.
Pro Beautiful
Pro Easy to customize
Has a nice wiki which makes customizing it very easy.
Cons
Con Dead
Last release was in 2015.
Con No support for HiDPI
There's no support for HiDPI, and requests have been rejected. Current workaround is use some of few HiDPI themes.
Con Default configuration is lacking basic features
When booting Openbox for the first time, the user won't even know they have actually booted into a window manager as there will be nothing of note on the screen other than a right mouse action.
Con Unfamiliar configuration method
Beginners can be daunted by the configuration as it is just a couple of text files, which is unlike the graphical methods to customize environments they have experienced.
Con Early development stages
It has a few bugs and missing features.
Con Difficult setup
It has a lot of dependencies which is difficult to find and build in Debian. Also most dependencies are not found in the system repository.