Feathers and Flame

This setup combines the snappiness and good hardware support of CachyOS with the gorgeous minimalism of Niri and Noctalia Shell. It's completely modular; you can either breeze through the install menu, pressing 'Yes' to get a cohesive and well-configured system to start off with, or you can pick through selectively to avoid your particular raisins.

Some highlights

• Niri, Noctalia, CachyOS (obv)
• Comprehensive theming setup; colours chosen dynamically from wallpaper or specific theme per wallpaper
• Wallpaper keybinds for favourite groups: get a random wallpaper from any favourite category
• Highly keyboard-driven with carefully thought-out bindings for most use
• cbonsai screensaver
• Night light with wlsunset
• Fine-tuned window rules and shell configuration; custom hot-swap rules
• LUKS-encrypted auto-login
• Refined LazyVim out of the box
• Advanced power-management with tlp
• Performance optimisations with gamemode
• Privacy-focused browser setup with Tor and Mullvad browsers
• Hide supurfluous .desktop entries to keep the launcher clean
• File-sharing binds for localsend
• Improved Nautilus integration for LazyVim and Alacritty
• Preconfigured Virt-Manager with QEMU
• Pre-set mimetypes
• Easy-installation of suggested programs
• Limine snapshots

Showcase Pictures

Installation

Installation takes the form of a single curl command in an appropriate fresh CachyOS install.

of CachyOS

First, install CachyOS normally (from a flashed USB with their iso), subject to the following notes:

1. Select Limine as your bootloader.
   
2. Encrypt your drive by selecting btrfs and Encrypt System in the Partitions section.
   
3. Select Niri in the Desktop section.
4. You can uncheck Firefox in the Packages section, since Feathers can install Mullvad and Tor Browsers for you.
   
5. Choose the same password for your user login as you did for encryption.
   
6. Reboot!

of Feathers and Flame

The setup may install properly on other Arch-based systems, or a 'dirty' CachyOs install, but testing is done on clean CachyOs installations. If you're unsure, feel free to ask in an issue, or test in a VM first.

1. Once you've booted into your basic installation, press Mod+Return to open a terminal and run: curl -fsSL https://serpentdagger.com/feathers-and-flame/install | bash. You'll be greeted by a flashy owl:
   
2. Select the components you want, or just Ctrl + A for all of them!
   
3. You will be asked for confirmation before installing:
   
4. After pressing Yes, the installer will take a while to download and configure the system for you, depending on your bandwidth and hardware. After it's done, you will be prompted to reboot:
   
5. Once you've rebooted again, Feathers and Flame is ready for your enjoyment! I hope you have as great a time using it as I did setting it up!
   

Trouble?

The installer keeps track of what components have been finished successfully, so if something goes wrong mid-install you can continue where you left off, or try again, by re-running the installer with bash ~/.local/share/feathers-and-flame/install.sh. It will ask if you want to pick up where you left off, or give you the opportunity to skip a component if it doesn't seem to work for some reason. This is also used later in the update script to avoid refreshing or installing unselected components on update.