illogical-impulse on many distros

[clsty]

With the progress of #1061, it's now possible to install illogical-impulse on many distros.

Tested on Debian 13.

Important

• This is still experimental and some functionalities are missing. (It's safe to try it by creating a test user anyway.)
  • To see the plan about fixing them, see dist-nix/README.md.
  • I will be kinda busy in near future so the progress on dist-nix will be slowed down, however if you're willing to contribute, PRs are welcomed.
  • I've developed tinydots before implementing dist-nix. You may also try tinydots if you just want to use Hyprland on Debian. It uses waybar, and is very lightweight so it does not have "missing functionality".
• Nix uses a large number of inode. If you're still using fixed inode allocation filesystem such as ext4, it may run out of free inode. Some recommendations for dynamic inode allocation filesystem are xfs, btrfs, zfs.
• This method uses Nix but it's not for NixOS. It maybe also works on NixOS, though not tested. Specifically, some NixGL wrappers are only for non-NixOS distros and may potentially cause problem on NixOS.

Steps: Prepare test user (Optional)

Note

This section allows the changes made by script to be removed cleanly later, however if you're fine with keeping the changes you can skip this section.

1. Create a new user with sudo priviledge.

Take t1 as example. Other username is also fine, just remember to keep consistency with the usernames below.

The command to create a new user with sudo priviledge depends on distro.
Normally, for Debian run

sudo useradd -mG sudo -s /bin/bash t1

For Arch Linux run

sudo useradd -mG wheel -s /bin/bash t1

2. Set a password.

sudo passwd t1

3. Switch to this user
You can now switch to another tty and login as this user.
However tty is not very friendly, so you can use su instead:

su - t1

Note that this can not be su t1, or else things will not work as expected.

Steps: Install and use

1. Install illogical-impulse

Important

Due to limitations of Nix on non-NixOS distro, some dependencies need to be installed via system package manager, including gnome-keyring, fish, swaylock and curl.

For each of them, if command is not found, the script will try to install it based on your distro, but this may fail. In such case you need to install them manually first.

Run the line below to test:

which gnome-keyring fish swaylock curl

Automatic method:
P.S. As for myself, I also add --force because I clearly know what this script will do. If you've login as a test user, I guess it's also fine to specify --force for you.

bash <(curl -s https://ii.clsty.link/get) -- --via-nix

Manual-ish method:

git clone https://github.com/end-4/dots-hyprland
cd dots-hyprland
./setup install --via-nix

2. Run Hyprland
Press Ctrl-Alt-F3 for example to login on tty3 as the user which installed illogical-impulse just now. e.g. If you've created test user t1 then login as t1.

Then run

hyprland;exit

3. Explore

The illogical-impulse should now launch. Explore as you like.

As mentioned above, some functionalities may be missing.

Tip

• Press Super-Return to launch a terminal.
• Press Super to open App launcher.
• (The cheatsheet seems not work however.)
• If you want log from Quickshell, you can't use pkill qs; qs -c ii as before. Run pkill .quickshell-wra; qs -c ii instead.

4. Quit
To quit Hyprland, if you'd like to do it in terminal, run pkill .Hyprland-wrapp.

Steps: Cleaning (Optional)

Note

This section is for removing the changes made by the previous steps. If you're fine with keeping the changes, just ignore this section.

1. Remove the test user
Note: This step is only applicable if you've created the test user t1.

Login as another user, run

sudo userdel -r t1

This will wipe user t1 with its home directory /home/t1 from your system.
If this fails cuz some process from t1 is still running, you may need to restart system and then retry.

2. Futher cleaning

• You may want to remove the packages installed via system package manager: gnome-keyring fish swaylock curl
• You may want to uninstall Nix from your system by running: /nix/nix-installer uninstall