Questions

The questions people ask most, answered from the repository.

Where is the wallpaper in the screenshots?

All thirty-three wallpapers are in the repository, in home/.local/share/wallpapers/, and setup copies them to ~/.local/share/wallpapers/.

Wallpaper	File
The pagoda in front of Mount Fuji	pagoda-fuji-blossom.jpeg
The green valley and its cliffs	emerald-cliffs.jpeg
The castle under a full moon, in the Moon castle profile	japanese-castle-full-moon.jpeg
The bay at night, in the Night bay profile	tropical-bay-night.jpeg

Who made the wallpapers?

They are photographs somebody else turned into the oil look, the impasto style the project is named after, and then only sharpened. All of them are in home/.local/share/wallpapers/.

Does it work on Manjaro, EndeavourOS or another distribution?

It is built and tested on Arch Linux. setup installs with pacman and an AUR helper, so an Arch-based distribution may work, but none has been tested. What it cannot do without is Hyprland 0.56 or newer, configured in Lua (tested on 0.56.2): a distribution that ships an older Hyprland cannot read the configuration. setup checks neither the distribution nor the Hyprland version, so check both before you run it.

Is there an ISO?

There is one to build. impasto-iso makes a USB stick that installs Arch Linux and puts the desk on it at the first boot. Building it needs archiso, so it is built on a machine that already runs Arch; nothing is offered for download. See From a USB stick.

On a working Arch system, install from a terminal or a console, and look at what it would do first:

./setup install --dry-run    # say what would happen, and do none of it
./setup install

See Installation.

Can I use only the shell, or only some of it?

setup installs the whole desk: there is no option to leave out one program’s configuration. What you can leave out is a step: --skip-packages, --skip-system (the login screen and the boot splash’s files), --skip-plugins (shake to find and refraction) and --skip-extras (what opens which file, GTK, the cursor, Nautilus, VSCodium, Vesktop, Spotify, face unlock, camera effects and the boot splash). ./setup with nothing after it offers the same four as switches.

Taking part of it by hand is possible, since home/ is laid out exactly as your home directory and home/.config/quickshell/ is the shell. But only the whole desk is tested, and the shell expects the Hyprland configuration beside it: its keys are bound there, and Settings → Keys changes them through it.

Can I keep my own Hyprland config?

Yours is moved aside, not lost. ./setup install copies the desk’s Hyprland configuration to ~/.config/hypr/; a file of yours already at one of its paths is moved to ~/.local/state/impasto/backups/ first, and ./setup uninstall puts it back.

To change the desk’s configuration, edit the copies under ~/.config/hypr/modules/. setup keeps an edited file and writes its own new version beside it as <name>.new, so ./setup update never overwrites your change, and Settings → System → Updates → Changed files lists every such file with a button to settle it. Most of what people edit by hand is in Settings already: keys under Keys, screens under Displays, gaps and rounding under Windows.

Does it work with more than one monitor?

Yes. Every screen carries the whole bar, and the island is live on the one with the keyboard. Each screen keeps widgets, decks of notes and spectra of its own, and the dock is on every screen too; either can be kept to the screen you are on instead. A workspace number brings that workspace to the screen you are on, or each screen can have ten workspaces of its own; SUPER ALT ← → moves to the other screen, and the brightness keys dim the screen with the keyboard, an external monitor over DDC/CI. Drag the screens into place under Settings → Displays and the arrangement is kept for that set of screens, and comes back on its own when you plug them in again. See how several screens work, Displays, and what it does not do.

Does it work on a HiDPI screen?

Each screen has its own scale, set under Settings → Displays with a slider from 1× to 3× in steps of 0.05.

What languages does it speak?

English and Spanish. Settings → System → This machine → Language switches the settings window, and the cards used to arrange the desktop and the control centre; most of what the island shows stays in English. It is the shell’s language only: it does not change the system’s locale or rename your folders.

How do I uninstall it?

./setup uninstall

It removes every file it installed that nobody has edited since, lists the edited ones and leaves them, and puts back what it moved aside at install. It puts the default boot splash back and removes the virtual camera’s module options. It does not remove packages, oh-my-zsh, the Hyprland plugins, howdy-next and the face enrolled with it, the camera’s models, or the themes the shell wrote into ~/.config. See Updating.

How do I update?

./setup update pulls the repository and installs again, with the same options. Or press Update under Settings → System → Updates, which lists the commits waiting and runs the same update in a terminal. See Updating.

Where do I report a bug?

Open an issue on GitHub with what you did, what happened, and your Hyprland version (hyprctl version). Pull requests go to the same repository; ./setup check runs the checks CI runs, and is worth running before you open one.