When comparing bspwm vs Hyprland, the Slant community recommends bspwm for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop environments for Arch Linux?” bspwm is ranked 13th while Hyprland is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose bspwm is:
It has a low footprint.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very lightweight
It has a low footprint.
Pro Very flexible
The keyboard shortcut are handled by another module so it's easy to use other inputs. The configuration is also simple.
Pro Open source
It's open source.
Pro Drag&drop / Mouse support for resize/move
You can resize, switch panes, and resize tiles via the mouse.
Pro Simple interface
All actions of the window manager (like opening or resizing a window, changing the workspace, etc.) are handled by a program called bspc, which communicates with bspwm over a socket connection. The config file is just a shell executable making calls to that program. This makes it very easy to write your own scripts to handle bspwm's behavior.
Pro Based on binary space partitioning
The windows tiling is handled as the leaves of a full binary tree. This makes it easy to partition as you like.
Pro Simple, adheres to the UNIX philosophy
Configuration takes much less work than in similar window managers. Hotkey binding is handled by a separate utility, sxhkd.
Pro Native gaps
Has gaps!
Pro Easily scriptable / modular
All window management is done via the bspc command allowing for easy scripting and extensibility. This also means your sxhkd keybinds can be ported elsewhere without being tied to the wm.
Pro Live configuration updates
No need to restart for updating configurations.
Pro Simple and easy configuration
When everything is seperate, keybinding, status bar, windows manager, it makes everything is easier to configure deeply in detail and organization.
Pro Separate hotkey daemon
The hotkeys run through sxhkd which is a daemon that's separate from the window manager itself.
Pro Comes without a compositor
You can to choose which compositor you want! A popular one is compton.
Out of the box it "Lacks transparency support" but if you choose to add compton then you can have transparency, blur etc.
Pro Has basic ewmh implementation
With basic ewmh I can easily config to make a fullscreen program show in a window.
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 Poorly documented
Compared to something like i3 for example, a user following through i3's documentation is basically guaranteed to get a working desktop suited to their needs. Setting up bspwm is much more of a headache due to developers assuming things are clearer than they are.
Con Lacks transparency support
Like most window managers there is no built in compositing, which means no transparencies.
Con Lack of layouts
It offers less layouts then most of the tiled windows managers. (Only binary and monocle)
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.