His Hyprland setup looks cool if you’re into that sorta thing but it’s just not what users just switching to mint, fedora, whatever might be looking for.

I would not underestimate how much of a draw “it looks cool” can have on people who are not tech savy at all. If you think about what drives new phone purchases, their major version upgrades always include lots of things that are nothing but eye-candy and those are often heavily featured in their promotion material.

If the goal is to get casual users to convert to Linux, I would argue that aesthetics is a lot more important than ANY talk about technical details, privacy, etc. If those users cared about those things, they would’ve switched already.

Now my bigger worry is that those users will bounce off before they manage to get their setup to look as (subjectively) cool as his.