Name
Ryoku (力, chikara or ryoku) is Japanese for “power” or “strength”. The
project takes the name plainly: it is about power, and about making that power
beautiful.
Tagline
力と美のために : For the sake of power and beauty.
Keep this line. It is the heart of the project.
What it is
Ryoku Arch is a premium, opinionated Arch Linux workstation environment for
powerful desktops and laptops. The desktop is the Hyprland
compositor with a Quickshell-based UI driven
by a Go daemon (ryoku-shell). It ships as signed pacman packages from the
[ryoku] repository, with a guided installer that adds the repo, installs
ryoku-desktop, and hands you a riced desktop on first boot.
The base is deliberately lean, and it scales up with the plugins, extras, and
apps you actually use. Theming follows the wallpaper through wallust, brand
elements stay constant, and one control plane (the ryoku CLI and Ryoku
Settings, the Hub) owns updates, snapshots, appearance, displays, and the
shell.
Ryoku is an environment on top of Arch, not its own distribution. Stick to
“Ryoku Arch”, “the Ryoku environment”, or “the Ryoku workstation”. See
Branding for the verbal and visual rules.
Who it is for
- Desktop and laptop users who want Arch to feel finished on strong hardware.
- Developers who need terminals, browsers, files, notes, containers, and media
tools ready on day one, without building the whole desktop from scratch.
- Power users who like a riced desktop but want the rice maintained as a
product, not a private dotfiles pile.
- Users who want advanced workflows surfaced as plugins instead of tray icons
and one-off scripts.
Intended use
The main use case is a personal workstation: development, browsing, media,
notes, terminals, containers, hardware controls, and workflow surfaces in one
coherent system.
Security-aware features still matter, but they live as plugin lanes among
others, not as the entire identity. For professional, security-sensitive work,
keep a dedicated engagement environment with client separation, audited
snapshots, and explicit operating boundaries. Ryoku is a workstation first.
What distinguishes it
- A pre-riced Hyprland desktop. The default look is a product choice, not a
placeholder. Hyprland is authored in Lua, one concern per module, so the
config is readable instead of a tangle.
- One shell stack. A single Quickshell UI plus the
ryoku-shell daemon
decide together (the daemon owns state, the UI renders), instead of stitching
a dozen widgets and tray apps.
- Signed packages and one update command.
ryoku update brings the system
current from the signed [ryoku] repo, re-lays the base config with
ryoku materialize, and reloads the shell. On a btrfs root with snapper
configured (the standard install), each run is wrapped in a snapper
pre/post snapshot pair, and rollback is also selectable from the Limine
boot menu.
- A strict Ryoku command and config surface. The
ryoku CLI is the system
front door; ~/.config/hypr is where your config lives; Ryoku Settings
(Mod+,) is the one place to change appearance, displays, input, keybinds,
the lockscreen, animations, window and layer rules, autostart, the shell, and
the desktop widgets.
- A visual system. Boot, login, lock, shell, terminal, and app defaults are
treated as one thing. The Greek Noir palette with
#F25623 力 is the brand
anchor; wallpaper-driven themes ride on top.
What it is not
- A fixed image you cannot shape.
- A bare window-manager starter kit with no defaults or direction.
- A general-purpose distribution with a Ryoku wallpaper.
- A specialist engagement-only stack.
- A re-skin of an upstream shell. Upstream projects are important sources, but
Ryoku’s job is to turn the useful pieces into a Ryoku-owned, modular system.
See Omarchy heritage for what Ryoku adapts and what
it owns outright.
Roadmap
Near-term priorities:
- Keep the Hyprland workstation stable enough for daily use on real hardware.
- Shape the current Quickshell-based shell into a Ryoku-owned plugin shell,
with plugins as first-class extension points instead of bespoke scripts.
See Plugins for current status.
- Keep ISO builds signed and verifiable through the release pipeline.
- Move security-adjacent, developer, media, hardware, and capture workflows
into clean plugin lanes.
- Expand real-hardware install coverage before calling the ISO stable.
See also
Last modified on June 24, 2026
