Arch-GKuba

A personal post-install wizard for Arch-based systems, including CachyOS. It installs optional package groups, copies desktop assets, can apply a KDE Plasma configuration, install Dank Shell on Hyprland, and run a full system update — all from an interactive terminal UI with a review step before anything changes.

Run it as your regular user. The script uses sudo only for system package, service, and configuration changes; you enter your password once and the script keeps sudo alive until the run finishes. Running it as root is refused.

Quick start

./post-install.sh

To download and run the current script directly:

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gkuba/Arch-GKuba/main/post-install.sh)

Try it first without changing anything:

./post-install.sh --dry-run

The layout fits a standard 80×24 terminal and uses up to 100 columns when available.

How the wizard works

1. Packages and updates — choose the optional package groups and the full system update.
2. Desktop assets — choose wallpapers and/or cursor themes.
3. Desktop themes — choose the KDE Plasma configuration or Dank Shell. Only one desktop is set up per machine, so choosing one clears the other.
4. Review selections — fine-tune individual packages and items. Each one shows whether it is already installed on this system.
5. Review the plan — a summary of everything the run will do. Problems that would make the run fail (for example, paru not available, or KDE configuration selected outside a Plasma session) are shown here and block continuing until they are fixed.
6. Authenticate — enter your sudo password. It is passed only to sudo through a pipe and is never logged or stored.

Installation then runs step by step, with live output in a frame:

• A step that succeeds continues automatically after a short pause.
• If the system update or pacman package step fails, the run stops there.
• If a later step fails, you can continue with the remaining steps or stop.
• Ctrl+C during a step finishes that step safely, then stops; it never interrupts pacman mid-transaction.
• Package manager prompts are skipped after you approve the plan. Commands run without keyboard input, so anything that would prompt fails visibly instead of hanging.

The completion screen lists each step’s result and duration, tells you when a reboot is needed (new kernel or newly built DKMS module), and Ctrl+D opens the full log. The log path is shown on screen (under /tmp).

Keys

Options

-a, --apps         Extra desktop applications
-c, --cooling      CoolerControl, liquidctl, and the MSI nct6687d sensor driver (AUR)
-w, --wallpapers   Copy DESetupLinux wallpapers into ~/Pictures/Wallpapers
-u, --cursors      Copy DESetupLinux cursor themes into ~/.icons
-k, --kde          KDE Plasma configuration
-D, --dankshell    Dank Shell on Hyprland with Ghostty (DuxLabs headless installer)
-U, --update       Full system update (pacman -Syu) before anything else
-A, --all          -a, -c, -w, -u and -k (add -U for a system update; with -D, Dank Shell replaces -k)
-n, --dry-run      Run the whole wizard and install screens but change nothing
-h, --help         Show help

Selection options pre-select those items and open the wizard at the review screen. Nothing runs until you confirm the plan and enter your password. Short options can be combined:

./post-install.sh -ak      # apps + KDE, starting at review
./post-install.sh -An      # all selections with KDE, no update, dry run
./post-install.sh -ADU     # all selections with Dank Shell instead of KDE, after a system update

DRY_RUN=1 ./post-install.sh also enables a dry run. In a dry run every command that would change the system is printed in the output frame instead of executed; read-only checks (package status, downloads into a temporary directory) still run so you can see what a real run would find.

What each selection does

Packages and the system update

The system update is off by default. Without it, package installs still sync the package databases and upgrade the system in the same transaction (pacman -Syu --needed), because syncing without upgrading would be a partial upgrade, which Arch does not support. Packages that are already installed are skipped, and when nothing needs installing, nothing is synced or upgraded. With the system update selected, it runs first (pacman -Syu) and later installs use pacman -S --needed.

Extra desktop applications

Installs Discord, Ghostty, Obsidian, Vivaldi, Spotify Launcher, and Solaar from your configured pacman repositories. Each can be deselected on the review screen.

CoolerControl and MSI sensor support

Installs coolercontrol, coolercontrold, and liquidctl with pacman, and the nct6687d-dkms-git sensor driver from the AUR with paru.

• If paru is not installed, it is installed from your configured repositories (CachyOS provides it). On stock Arch, install paru first — the script does not bootstrap an AUR helper, and the plan screen will tell you if it is missing.
• Matching headers are installed for every kernel package present so DKMS can build the sensor module.
• When the daemon is selected, the CoolerControl profile is downloaded from DESetupLinux and checked before use, an existing /etc/coolercontrol/config.toml is backed up, and coolercontrold is enabled and started.

Desktop assets

Downloads DESetupLinux and copies wallpapers into ~/Pictures/Wallpapers and/or cursor themes (including Empty-Butterfly-Purple) into ~/.icons. Unrelated files already in those folders are left alone.

KDE Plasma configuration

Must run inside an active KDE Plasma session. It:

• applies the Oxygen global theme, widget style, Plasma style, window decoration, and lock screen theme;
• applies Breeze Dark with the Violet-Noir accent (#453078) and verifies both persisted;
• sets Ghostty as the default terminal and binds Super+X and Ctrl+Alt+T to it (Ghostty and Oxygen are installed automatically when needed);
• lets legacy X11 apps receive mouse-button events for push-to-talk and turns Num Lock on at login;
• applies the Empty-Butterfly-Purple cursor at 48px when cursor themes are selected;
• when ~/Pictures/Wallpapers exists, configures an hourly all-screen wallpaper slideshow, and picks a random PNG for the Plasma Login Manager and lock screen.

Existing KDE configuration files (and /etc/plasmalogin.conf) are backed up to ~/.dotfiles-backup/kde-appearance-<timestamp>/ first. Every setting write is checked; the step reports how many failed, if any. Log out and back in to see every change.

Dank Shell

Installs Dank Shell on Hyprland with the DuxLabs headless installer, the same as:

curl -fsSL https://install.duxlabs.dev | sh -s -- -c hyprland -t ghostty --all-features --replace-configs hyprland --privesc sudo -y

• installs Hyprland, Ghostty, Dank Shell (dms), quickshell and its other dependencies, plus the optional dms-greeter, dsearch and dcal (--all-features); adw-gtk-theme (GTK theming) and breeze (the Qt style) are installed in the pacman step, and qtengine (Qt theming, from the AUR with paru) in the AUR step, as Dank Shell’s application themes docs require. xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland is installed in the pacman step as well: duxinstall leaves it out, and without it native Wayland apps get no global shortcuts (Discord’s keybinds, push-to-talk) or Hyprland screen sharing;
• replaces only the Hyprland config, after backing up the existing one; an existing Ghostty config is kept;
• uses the sudo session this script already holds (--privesc sudo), so it never prompts. Without the system update selected, the step syncs and upgrades first so duxinstall never installs onto stale package databases;
• the bootstrap script verifies the installer binary’s SHA-256 checksum before running it, and duxinstall writes its own log to /tmp/duxinstall-<timestamp>.log.

It does not need a Plasma session. Choosing Dank Shell also selects the wallpapers and cursor themes, which its appearance step uses.

The Dank Shell appearance step then applies the Violet-Noir look from DESetupLinux/DankShell. Changed files are backed up to ~/.dotfiles-backup/dankshell-<timestamp>/ first, and running it again changes nothing that is already current:

• installs the Violet-Noir custom theme to ~/.config/dms/themes/ and selects it in ~/.config/dms/settings.json, together with the Empty-Butterfly-Purple cursor at 32px (cursorSettings) and the Fit wallpaper mode for the desktop and login screen, keeping every other setting;
• writes the cursor to ~/.config/hypr/dms/cursor.lua and ~/.Xresources with the same content Dank Shell writes, because Dank Shell only writes them when the cursor is changed in its Settings;
• installs ~/.config/hypr/violet-noir.lua (gradient border, glassy windows at 90% focused and 82% unfocused, xray blur so windows blur the wallpaper rather than the windows beneath), which overrides Dank Shell’s Window opacity slider, and ~/.config/hypr/discord-ptt.lua, which binds the forward mouse button to Discord’s global push-to-talk shortcut so it works whichever window is focused (Discord needs a keyboard key assigned to push-to-talk to register that shortcut; ~/.local/bin/discord-ptt-key, also in the launcher as “Discord Push-to-Talk Key”, assigns F14 to it); both load at the end of hyprland.lua, after the Dank Shell fragments;
• turns on Dank Shell’s Xray blur for its bar and popups by adding its rule to ~/.config/hypr/dms/layout.lua, where Dank Shell keeps that toggle;
• in ~/.local/state/dms/session.json, gives each connected monitor a random wallpaper from ~/Pictures/Wallpapers, shown with Fit, and rotates each one in random order every hour (monitor names come from /sys/class/drm);
• themes GTK apps, CachyOS Hello among them, the way Dank Shell’s “Apply GTK colors” button does: runs its gtk.sh apply (copying adw-gtk3 into ~/.local/share/themes for Dank Shell to recolor), adds the dank-colors.css import to ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css (Dank Shell manages the GTK theme only once that import is there), and sets gtk-theme to adw-gtk3-dark and color-scheme to prefer-dark so the first login is already dark;
• themes Qt apps, Dolphin among them, with Dank Shell’s colors through qtengine: violet-noir.lua sets QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME (and _QT6) to qtengine in place of the gtk3 passthrough, and the step points ~/.config/qtengine/config.json at Dank Shell’s DankMatugen.colors (starting from qtengine’s example config, other keys kept). Dank Shell rewrites that scheme and the config on every theme change. The AUR package’s Qt5 plugin is linked into /usr/lib/qt/plugins, where Arch’s Qt5 looks; dms doctor checks both;
• runs dms-greeter sync --yes so the login screen uses the same theme and each monitor’s current wallpaper, then lets the greeter group read ~/Pictures/Wallpapers with ACLs, which the sync does not cover;
• copies the Empty-Butterfly-Purple cursor to /usr/local/share/icons, since the login screen only uses a cursor theme installed system-wide;
• preselects the plain Hyprland session (not Hyprland with uwsm) on the login screen, unless another session was chosen there since. The sync’s auto-login warning about memory.json on the first run is harmless: the group change only applies after logging out.

Log out (once more if the greeter group was just added) and choose the Hyprland session to start it. If Dank Shell is already running while the step runs, restart it so it reads the new settings.

DESETUP_REPO=<path or URL> makes the script use another DESetupLinux checkout, for testing changes before they are pushed.

After running

If a package step installed a new kernel, or the MSI sensor driver was just built, reboot to load it. The completion screen tells you when this applies.