Nitrux Hyprland Is Happening, Thanks to Plasma LTS’s End

I remember, during the early days of my distro-hopping journey, how excited I was to try systemd-free distros. Nitrux was the first one I tried—and despite the short experience, it felt unique.

More recently, Hyprland caught my attention, but I haven’t had the time to fully explore and learn it. Now feels like the perfect moment to try both Nitrux and Hyprland together. Why? Because the next Nitrux release is shipping with Hyprland, officially discontinuing its long-developed NX Desktop based on KDE Plasma.

But why is this happening? And why should you be excited about Nitrux Hyprland?

One KDE Decision Changed the Nitrux Path

To provide users with a stable desktop environment and a long-term supported base, Nitrux developers built their in-house NX Desktop on Debian and KDE Plasma LTS. NX Desktop made Plasma even more customizable and visually appealing (yes, I know—visual taste is subjective).

But while the Linux community (and Nitrux users) waited for a new release, the KDE team decided to drop Plasma LTS releases. This forced the Nitrux team to pause and rethink their direction. A few weeks later, they made a bold decision: switching to Hyprland and officially discontinuing NX Desktop.

Don’t worry—this doesn’t affect the Maui Apps or other Nitrux projects. Development of Maui Shell is currently on hold. It’s not discontinued, but it no longer marks the project’s immediate next chapter.

Hyprland on Nitrux Means a Unique Experience

Allah Almighty says: “Perhaps you hate something while it is good for you.”

The Holy Quran, Surah Al-Baqarah (Chapter 2), Verse 216.

Allah Almighty says: “Perhaps you hate something while it is good for you.”
While some Nitrux users are understandably worried about how this change may affect their experience, others—like me—are excited. I believe Hyprland on Nitrux will deliver something truly unique, user-friendly, and visually attractive—without the usual headaches of manually configuring a Wayland compositor.

Since Hyprland is just a Wayland tiling compositor, it needs additional components to provide a complete desktop experience. Here’s what Nitrux is integrating:

• Waybar: A highly customizable Wayland bar that replaces the status panel, giving you battery info, volume control, network status, brightness control, and more.
• Wlogout: A logout menu for Wayland environments, offering a graphical interface to reboot, shut down, lock, suspend, or log out.
• QtGreet: A modern Qt based graphical greeter for greetd display managers, replacing SDDM.

Is this all the changes? No. The team also decided to switch to the Cachy kernel from the current Liquorix kernel, as it enables PSI¹, which is fundamental for the function of Waydroid². Additionally, the team is dedicating more effort to the development of NX AppHub³ and AppBox⁴ to address the downsides and limitations of generic AppImages.

Such a significant transition takes time, so we likely won’t see the new Nitrux Hyprland very soon. However, I expect it to arrive within the next few weeks.

💬 As a current Nitrux user, what are your expectations for the future of the project?
What features will you miss from NX Desktop? And if you’re not a user yet, are you eager to try the new Nitrux when it’s out in the wild?

1. Pressure Stall Information (PSI) is a Linux kernel feature that quantifies the time tasks spend stalled or waiting for critical system resources such as CPU, memory, and I/O. ↩︎
2. Waydroid is a container-based compatibility layer that enables Android to run in a containerized environment on Linux systems. ↩︎
3. NX AppHub is a system designed to provide applications for Nitrux. It includes a CLI component, a central repository, and an integration daemon. ↩︎
4. An AppBox is essentially an AppImage, but with key differences: it is guaranteed to work in Nitrux and is built from pre-built Debian packages using a curated YAML file from the central Git-based repository. It is managed via the command line tool, not manually downloaded or built, and it doesn’t embed AppImageUpdate metadata. ↩︎