hybrid-d77: Niri Joins the Mix
hybrid-d77: Niri Joins the Mix
Contents
Niri Arrives
When we first met hybrid-d77 in September 2026 (linked below), the picture was wonderfully tidy: Chimera Linux's unusual Linux-kernel-and-BSD-userland foundation, dressed with the Sway compositor and Waybar, and finished with a patched installer. Barely six weeks later, the project has grown a second personality. Two live images now sit on its SourceForge page, both built on 24 October 2026, and one of them swaps Sway for niri and a home-grown desktop shell called Utumno. Alongside it arrives a graphical installer named Mocinha. That is plenty to unpack for something modestly labelled a proof of concept, so let us take it one piece at a time.
Start with the housekeeping. There is still no numbered release; each image simply carries its build date. The two files are hybrid-d77-live-x86_64-20261024-sway.iso and hybrid-d77-live-x86_64-20261024-niri.iso, each around 2.3 GB, with a tiny SHA-256 checksum file beside it. Everything is built for x86_64 only, and the project's own summary still calls the whole thing a proof of concept, made to show what Chimera's tools, such as chimera-live, chimera-install-scripts and cports, can do. DistroWatch lists it as active, with Portugal as its country of origin and BSD and Linux hybrid as its type.
Underneath, nothing about the foundations has changed. It is still a regular Chimera system, with apk looking after packages, dinit looking after services, and Chimera's main and user repositories switched on. What differs between the two images is the session sitting on top.
So what exactly is niri? It is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor, which is a mouthful, so here is the friendly version. A compositor is the program that draws your windows and handles your keyboard and mouse on Wayland. Traditional tiling compositors, Sway included, squeeze every window onto the screen at once, dividing the space further as you open more. Niri takes a different view. Windows sit in columns along an endless horizontal strip, and your screen is simply a viewport that scrolls sideways along it. Open another window and it joins the strip rather than shrinking its neighbours. Workspaces, meanwhile, are stacked vertically, so moving around feels like scrolling a long roll of paper left and right, then stepping up or down a floor.
Because both editions are built from the same tree, they share far more than they differ. Neither has a login screen: you reach a plain text prompt, and logging in on the first console (tty1) launches the session through your ~/.profile, which runs either exec sway or exec niri. Log in on any other console and you simply get a shell, and if you would rather start the session by hand, you can delete those lines. Both editions also ship the same everyday applications: the foot terminal, Firefox, Thunderbird, Thunar for files, Mousepad for text, mpv for video, zathura for PDFs, cmus for music, Neovim, htop, fastfetch, the GNOME calculator and pavucontrol for audio. Notifications come from SwayNotificationCenter on both.
The real difference is who looks after the furniture. The Sway edition keeps Waybar for the bar, wmenu and fuzzel for launching programs, swaylock for the lock screen and fuzzel-power-menu for shutting down. In the niri edition, a single component, Utumno, takes over the bar, the launcher, the lock screen and the power menu, and adds a wallpaper picker and an on-screen display for volume and brightness for good measure. It is a neat consolidation: one shell, one look, one thing to learn.
A word of candour, which the project itself offers. Its wiki describes the niri edition as the newer of the two: the ISO builds and the configuration passes niri's own validation check, but it had not yet been booted on real hardware when the page was written. The Sway edition, as we noted last time, had already been confirmed on physical machines. Treat the niri image as a promising experiment, ideally tried in a virtual machine first. Ours installed and ran without fuss in a VM, which is encouraging, though no substitute for the real thing.
The d77 Toolkit
Utumno is the star of the niri edition. It is built on Quickshell, a toolkit for assembling desktop shells from QtQuick components, and the project ships its own build, quickshell-h77, alongside the utumno package itself. DistroWatch describes Utumno as based on a Quickshell fork. You get a bar along the top, while everything else appears on demand: press a key and the launcher, lock screen, power menu or wallpaper picker pops up, then politely disappears again.
Those pieces are driven by a small command called qsd77, which is also how the key bindings call Utumno. You can use it from a terminal yourself. The command qsd77 launcher -c utumno opens the launcher, qsd77 locker -c utumno locks the screen, qsd77 wallpaper -c utumno opens the wallpaper picker and qsd77 session -c utumno shows the power menu. Add --help for the full list. If the bar ever goes missing, qsd77 run -c utumno brings Utumno back.
Super is the modifier throughout, and the essentials are easy to remember. Super + Return opens foot, Super + Space opens Utumno's launcher, and Super + D or Super + Tab shows an overview of all your windows. Super + Y opens the wallpaper picker, Super + N the notification centre, Super + L locks the screen and Super + X brings up the power menu. Super + Q closes a window, and Super + Shift + E quits niri. Forgotten one? Super + Shift + / lists every shortcut, which makes the learning curve refreshingly gentle.
Then come the moves that make niri feel like niri. Super + 1 to 9 jumps to a workspace, and adding Shift carries the current column along with you. The arrow keys move focus, left and right between columns, up and down between windows inside a column, while Super + Shift with the arrows shuffles columns and windows about. Super + F maximises the current column, Super + Shift + F goes full screen, Super + C centres a column and Super + R cycles through preset column widths. Super with minus or equals nudges a column narrower or wider, Super + W turns a column into tabs, and Super + Shift + T toggles a window between floating and tiled. Alt + Tab flips between recent windows. The Print key captures an area, with Ctrl for the whole screen or Alt for the current window, and the pictures land in ~/Pictures/Screenshots/. Volume and brightness keys work too, even on the lock screen.
If you hop between the two editions, there are a couple of muscle-memory traps worth knowing about. The lock screen is Super + T on Sway but Super + L on niri, and closing a window is Super + Shift + Q on Sway but a plain Super + Q on niri.
Customisation follows the same philosophy as the Sway edition, with the files simply changing names. The main niri configuration lives in ~/.config/niri/config.kdl, written in KDL, the document language niri uses. That file holds the programs launched with the session, the spawn-at-startup lines, which currently start PipeWire, udiskie, the polkit agent, swaync, swayidle and Utumno. It also covers your keyboard, outputs, layout and window rules. Key bindings sit apart in ~/.config/niri/d77/binds.kdl, and colours, layout details and Alt + Tab behaviour have their own files beside it: colors.kdl, layout.kdl and alttab.kdl. Notification styling lives in ~/.config/swaync/. Niri applies changes the moment you save, so there is no reload key to remember.
One subtlety deserves attention, because it catches people out. The configuration ships as a template in /etc/skel and is copied into your home folder when your user is created. From then on, the copy in your home is the one that counts. Editing the template changes nothing for existing users, and when the project updates its niri configuration package, that refreshes /etc/skel rather than your own files. To start afresh, copy the original from /etc/skel/.config/ back over your version.
Two small defaults are worth a mention. The installer's keymap step sets only the text console's layout, whereas niri takes its layout from its own configuration, which is empty and therefore defaults to US. To change it, set a layout such as "pt" for Portuguese inside the xkb block of config.kdl. As for wallpapers, the picker lists whatever images sit in ~/Wallpaper/. On your first login that folder is stocked with hybrid-d77's own d77.png, and your choice is reapplied at every login. Night owls take note: the Sway edition runs wlsunset to warm the screen colours in the evening, but the niri edition has no night light. Idle behaviour is sensible, with the screen locking after five minutes, switching off after ten, and always locking before the computer suspends.
Two helpers make daily life easier. The first is h77-welcome, a text-mode window that opens at each login. Its menu offers About and keybinds, which shows the README with the credentials and main shortcuts, plus Install to disk, Update packages, and Don't show this again. That last choice deletes the autostart file, which on niri is ~/.config/niri/h77-welcome.autostart. Copy it back from /etc/skel to revive the window, or simply run h77-welcome in a terminal whenever you fancy.
The second is h77-update, run with doas h77-update. Doas, for the uninitiated, is the minimalist alternative to sudo. This command looks after hybrid-d77's own packages, meaning the h77-* family, utumno, qsd77 and quickshell-h77, all published on the project's GitHub release. It downloads the latest release, checks the files against their SHA256SUMS and upgrades whatever is installed. It is edition-aware too: a Sway installation never receives the niri packages, and the other way round. You will need an internet connection, plus curl and jq, both of which come preinstalled. Everything else is ordinary Chimera business, so doas apk update and doas apk upgrade handle the wider system, while dinitctl manages services. Typing dinitctl list shows what is running, and doas dinitctl enable starts a service now and at every boot. Think of it as two lanes: h77-update for the project's own pieces, apk for the rest.
Taking It for a Spin
Grab either ISO from SourceForge, compare it with the checksum file beside it, and write it to a USB stick. From another Linux system, the wiki suggests dd. Check the device name with lsblk first, because everything on the target will be erased:
Boot from the stick and, at the login prompt, use the same demonstration accounts as before. Niri starts by itself and h77-welcome opens in a floating window, ready to guide you onwards. Press Super + Shift + / at any point for the shortcut list.
There are now two ways to install. The first is the familiar text installer, h77-installer, which the wiki calls the tested route. Start it from h77-welcome or with doas h77-installer. One tip is worth underlining: use h77-installer rather than calling chimera-installer directly, because Chimera's own installer offers to download its latest upstream version, which has none of hybrid-d77's extra steps. Its source option matters too. The local source, which is the default, copies the live system together with its configuration, while the network source installs from the Chimera repositories and does not add the session's packages for you. Only the local source has been tested end to end on real hardware.
The second route is the newcomer. Mocinha is a graphical GTK installer, developed by the project's author and available since 24 October. The project page says it resembles Calamares, the installer many distributions use, for an easier install. It is still labelled experimental and a work in progress. Open Mocinha Installer from the launcher, which is fuzzel on Sway and Utumno on niri, or run mocinha in a terminal; it asks for a password to get root. Its welcome page promises a complete plan to review before any disk is modified, and a design that works offline, reaching for the network only when online components are declared or chosen.
Mocinha is deliberately simple. On hybrid-d77 it copies the live system, needs a disk of at least 10 GB, formats the root partition as ext4, creates a 512 MB EFI system partition mounted at /boot/efi, and installs GRUB. Mocinha itself is left out of the finished system. That is a trade of flexibility for ease, so if you want to choose filesystems and partitions yourself, the text installer remains your route.
Once installation is done, reboot and log in with your new user on the first console, and the session starts just as it did in the live system. If your user belongs to the wheel group, it can run commands as root with doas. The welcome window keeps appearing at every login until you choose Don't show this again.
One last honest note, this time about the Sway edition. Its configuration binds Super + N, Super + O and Super + Y to nwggrid, d77run and a wallpaper swapper, yet the wiki points out that none of those programs is in the image, so those keys currently do nothing. If you are curious about wallpaper switching, the niri edition gets it from Utumno's own picker.
A final word
Hybrid-d77 began as a single, carefully assembled Sway desktop on an unusual base, and it has now become a small family with a fresh shell, a new installer and a proper update helper. The niri edition is young and the project says so plainly, which is rather refreshing. For anyone curious about scrollable tiling, or about how far Chimera's tooling can be stretched, it makes an inviting and low-risk experiment. Pour a cuppa, boot it in a virtual machine and enjoy the scroll.
Disclaimer: All product names, logos, trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned in this article, including Chimera Linux, niri, Sway, Quickshell and Calamares, are the property of their respective owners and are used here for identification and informational purposes only. The Distrowrite Project strives for accuracy and draws solely on the official sources listed below, but readers are encouraged to consult them directly for the latest details. Please use open-source software responsibly and in accordance with its applicable licence terms and the law.
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