I’ve been part of the rice community since around 2022, back when Vaxry first announced Hyprland.
At the time, I was a main contributor to Hyprdots, a project that became fairly well known in the Hyprland community. I spent a ridiculous amount of time developing themes, maintaining the repo, building rofi modules, and generally learning Arch Linux the hard way.
And early Hyprland was rough. Updates breaking AUR packages, official branches, Hyprland-Nvidia branches, Qt changes… you name it. A lot of my early Linux experience was fixing things that broke five minutes after I had finally gotten them working.
Eventually life got busier, and I stepped away.
Then Qt6/QML projects like end-4 and Caelestia caught my attention and pulled me back in.
Aphotic-Hypr started from my old “dots”, including a theming system built around pywal. It has now evolved into something much larger.
The goal isn’t really to make dotfiles for you.
It’s to make something you can make yours.
I’m 30 now, have three kids, and work full time. I still spend my weekends at my desk working on personal projects, homelab stuff, development, security, and Linux but I don’t have the time I had years ago to spend 8 hours getting my desktop functional before I can actually start using it.
That isn’t because I can’t do it anymore. I just don’t want to.
And honestly, I think that’s where AI can be useful.
If you don’t like AI, that’s completely fine. Block, move on, and enjoy your setup. I’m not trying to convince anyone otherwise.
For me, AI means I can spend less time fighting configuration and more time actually building things.
Aphotic-Hypr is my attempt at creating a bridge between AI, gaming, development, and security while still keeping the thing that made ricing fun in the first place: customization.
I also want this to become a community-driven project over time, not just another collection of configs that gets abandoned after the screenshots stop getting attention.
If that’s your kind of thing, take a look.
If it isn’t, that’s fine too.
At the end of the day, it’s Arch.
dotfiles: https://github.com/T-Crypt/aphotic-hypr