BITE-OS isn't a theme dropped on top of a distro. The pieces below were written from scratch for it — the stuff that makes it behave like its own system, not a wallpaper. This page is the workshop tour.
A complete fastfetch rewrite in pure Bash. What it does that stock fetch tools don't:
- Gacha logo roll — every time you open a terminal it picks a random logo from your icon pool (Laffy, the BITE fangs, glitch art). No two terminals look the same.
- Aspect-aware layouts — it classifies each image (by
sq_/wd_/tl_filename prefix) and renders it into a matching template: centered, side-by-side, or vertical — so a tall image and a wide image both look designed, not stretched. - Resize-aware rendering — it reads the live terminal size (
tput cols/lines) and scales the logo + the framed text box uniformly to fit the current window. The sixel image never gets squished on a short or narrow terminal, and the boxed system-info readout stays aligned at any size. - Stable on resize — the rolled pick is cached per shell session, so resizing a window redraws at the new size without re-rolling the gacha. Each session keeps its logo; only a fresh shell rolls again.
- Framed readout — distro / kernel / cpu+temp / gpu+usage / mem / shell / uptime / pkgs, drawn in a glyph-bordered box with the accent colour keyed to the theme.
The result: opening a terminal feels like the system greeting you — a different face every time, always fitted to the window.
Your whole desktop as a versioned, swappable artifact instead of fragile dotfiles:
rice save <name>— snapshots every managed config dir into a named vault entry.rice load <name>— swaps to it, auto-backing-up the current state first.rice rollback— undo the last load, instantly.- Destructive ops move files aside (never delete); anything outside the managed set is never touched.
Two complete desktops (caelestia + ilyamiro), swapped with one keypress.
Every swap auto-backs-up, and a 30-second watchdog auto-reverts if the new desktop
fails to come up — so you physically cannot lock yourself out.
A full system update (kernel / apps / AUR / rice) that re-asserts BITE-OS branding on every run, so updates never decay it back into vanilla CachyOS. It's optional (checks first, only acts if there's something to do), asks before touching anything, and logs every run. Pulls BITE-OS itself from the project's own pacman repo.
A login healthcheck quietly detects and rebuilds a wiped or broken config. Combined with the vault + watchdog, the system is built to recover from the exact kind of mess that started this project (see Laffy — it began with a brick).
A LARP overlay that engages a glitch shader, a dedsec video wallpaper, an amber "trace" HUD and paced popups — then tears all of it down cleanly, restoring your exact previous state (shader, damage tracking, borders, wallpaper). It's effects as a toggle, not a permanent cost.
- VAAPI video wallpapers that hardware-decode instead of pinning the CPU.
- An auto-pause daemon that freezes the wallpaper while a window is fullscreen.
- A ghost-reaper that guarantees exactly one wallpaper process — no stacked duplicates eating CPU, no matter how fast you switch.
wall-optimize— down-rates any wallpaper video to a lower frame rate for lower idle CPU, backing up the original.
Stock caelestia does image wallpapers (swww). I rewrote the background subsystem so it does live video too:
- A unified setter routes images → hyprpaper and videos → mpvpaper, transparently.
- The shell's background surface detects a video source and goes transparent so mpvpaper shows through underneath — the bar/widgets still composite on top.
- For videos, it grabs a still frame and feeds it to matugen, so the whole Material-You colour scheme themes itself off your video wallpaper, not just images.
- State is tracked so the picker shows the right checkmark and the wallpaper restores on reboot.
A from-scratch power-profile switcher — saver / balanced / perf — that I built
to coordinate layers that normally don't know about each other, all from one toggle:
- CPU: flips Intel turbo boost, sets the cpupower governor (powersave / performance / schedutil) and frequency caps.
- System: sets the power-profiles-daemon profile to match.
- Compositor: toggles Hyprland-side effects for the mode.
- Shell: patches caelestia's
shell.jsonso the bar/drawer's own animations and transparency react too — and does it with an atomic write (temp file on the same filesystem + rename) so Quickshell's config-watcher can't catch a half-written JSON and glitch the bar mid-switch. - Root knobs are wrapped in
sudo -n, so a missing sudoers rule just no-ops instead of prompting or breaking.
One tap = CPU, daemon, compositor and the shell's look all shift together, cleanly.