Confused on how/when hyprland is updated

Hello and welcome,

Unless you are riding alpha/beta/development releases then what your packages look like will be a little different or delayed compared to the absolute newest things happening at the, for example, upstream github repository.

If we continue to use the github example .. those features may not even be in the main branch of that github project yet, and even then may not have made it into a ‘release’ yet.

Depending on how Arch (or Cachy or AUR) packages are constructed or maintained they might be derived from a certain branch or may only follow the official releases, or may only get upgraded at certain intervals (such as skipping some minor version).

In the case of hyprland package we know its following the github releases and you can observe exactly how here: PKGBUILD · main · Arch Linux / Packaging / Packages / hyprland · GitLab
Which should correspond nicely to the ‘release’ scenario shown above .. with the current 0.52.2 release being the package that is in the Arch/Cachy repos: Release v0.52.2 · hyprwm/Hyprland · GitHub

Alternatively if you used something like hyprland-git from the AUR then you would be getting hyprland in its current upstream (development) form.