Pikaos : Hyprland

Yesterday, before I installed Hyprland on Mint I was researching Hyprland, and someone/somewhere mentioned pikaOS

PikaOS is a gaming/optimization-focused Linux distribution that emphasizes ease of use and high compatibility. Built on a Debian base but with cherry picked and custom compiled packages ensures that Pika is stable whilst being bang up to date!

I had mentioned in my post about Omarchy that I would have liked if it had Live ISO

I like to “try before buy install”.

PikasOS luckily has that option. So that is what I did.

As expected I booted into Hyprland login screen

What was the password for live user ? 🤔 I tried pikaos 😉 it worked 😄

I could see the waybar (Term I picked up while reading about Hyprland - maybe wrong)

But I had no idea what to do next.

Clicking on icons in waybar opened some settings.

But how do I open any app ?

I searched from my phone to find the basic keybindings. ¹

Turns out they are listed in a config file. Listing here for others who might run into such issues

• Super D for launcher
• Super Enter for the terminal

I have 2 monitor setup. And always builtin one becomes primary. App launcher look too tiny (since builtin screen is HiDPI Retina screen)

Luckily I found a way to make bigger external monitor as “Active” one.

One more nice thing about pikaOS was randomly changing wallpapers. They are (I assume) from some game - pikasOS being Gaming focused distro.

I liked most of them.

I spent only limited time. But I might replace mint with pikaOS

Since this is based on Debian Sid (unstable) it is indeed bleeding edge, and thus more suitable for Hyprland.

I have not analyzed it from “Let me replace my working system with it” point of view.

But the initial impression is good. 😄