▟▛▜▙ BITE-OS

// THE SYSTEM BIT YOU

A glitch-themed, performance-obsessed Linux distribution. Built on the CachyOS base — riced to the teeth, engineered to never get in your way.

v1.0 · codename dedsec · by GLITCH-BITE404

⤓ Download · 🛠 Built by hand · 🐕 Meet Laffy

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TL;DR — BITE-OS is a glitch-themed Linux distro on a CachyOS/Arch base: a full Hyprland rice, two swappable desktops, self-healing config, and one-key system updates — heavy looks, light idle. Grab the ISO and install in minutes. Named after my Shiba Inu, Laffy 🐕.

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◈ Gallery

caelestia rice	ilyamiro rice
Glitch dashboard	// THE SYSTEM BIT YOU
One-key self-update (SUPER+U)	Wallpaper / rice picker

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◈ What makes it BITE

BITE-OS isn't a reskin. It ships things stock Arch and CachyOS simply don't have:

⚠️ Developer Note: Unlike basic rice builds, most of the system UI has been completely reprogrammed, optimized, and natively pre-riced from the ground up for zero-latency execution.

• 🦷 Dot-switch — two complete desktops (caelestia + ilyamiro), swapped with one keypress. Every swap auto-backs-up your config, and a 30-second watchdog auto-reverts if anything breaks. You physically cannot get locked out.
• ⚙ Live GUI settings — keybinds, language, weather, startup apps and dot-switching — all editable from an in-system panel. No text files. Configs recompile and reload instantly.
• 🛠 Self-repair — a health check runs at every login and rebuilds a wiped config automatically. The OS fixes itself.
• ⬆ One-key update — SUPER+U runs a full system update (kernel, apps, AUR, rice) that keeps it BITE-OS — branding is re-asserted on every upgrade, so it never decays into vanilla CachyOS.
• ⚡ Fast — a full heavy glitch/DEDSEC rice that idles around 5% CPU and holds 144 fps. Performance is the whole point.
• 🌐 Keyless weather, glitch borders, animated everything — and it still doesn't lag.

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◈ Performance Engineering

The rice is heavy on purpose — and it still idles light because the backend is tuned, not the effects stripped. Nothing here costs you a single blur or shader.

Wallpaper engine (event-driven, single-instance):

• Video wallpapers hardware-decode via VAAPI (mpvpaper), not the CPU.
• An auto-pause daemon freezes the wallpaper (SIGSTOP) the instant a window goes fullscreen and resumes it on exit — a fullscreen game/video pays ~0% wallpaper cost.
• A flock mutex + a SIGCONT → SIGTERM → SIGKILL teardown guarantee exactly one wallpaper process — no matter how fast you spam the dot/wallpaper picker, it never stacks "ghost" instances.
• wall-optimize ships as a tool: it re-rates any wallpaper video to 24fps (lossless to the eye on a loop), cutting decode/composite load ~20–50%. Originals are always backed up, never destroyed.

Compositor (Hyprland, tuned for mobile iGPU):

• Direct scanout + per-window tearing — fullscreen games/video bypass the compositor entirely for lower latency and less GPU work. Only opt-in windows tear; the desktop never does.
• Region damage tracking (only redraw what changed), VRR, and blur passes tuned to the sweet spot for integrated graphics.
• Glitch/LARP mode toggles damage tracking around its shaders and restores the exact prior state on exit — effects are GPU shaders + paced event loops, not CPU busy-spinners.

System base (CachyOS):

• zram (zstd) compressed swap, ananicy-cpp process auto-prioritization, and the CachyOS performance kernel. Governor stays powersave — it still turbo-boosts under load, without the heat-throttling that performance invites on a laptop.

Result: a full glitch/DEDSEC rice that idles around 5–7% with a live video wallpaper (lower still on a static one) and holds 144 fps.

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◈ Does it match your vibe?

If your taste runs cyber / glitch / DEDSEC-hacker — neon-on-black, terminals that look like a breach in progress, fangs in the logo, animated everything — BITE-OS is built to feel like that the second it boots, no hours of ricing required. And if your vibe is something else entirely, it bends: two complete desktops, a live theming engine, and a rice vault mean you can reshape it into yours and never get locked out. It's opinionated out of the box, infinitely yours after.

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◈ Hand-built tooling

None of this is borrowed — it was written for BITE-OS. (Full writeup: BUILT.md.)

• glitch-fetch — a from-scratch fastfetch rewrite, built as a pure-Bash "gacha" engine: every time you open a terminal it rolls a random logo (Laffy, the BITE fangs, glitch art), auto-detects that image's aspect ratio, and renders it into a matching framed layout (centered / side-by-side / vertical) with a boxed, glyph-framed system readout. Per-shell caching keeps each session's pick stable. No two terminals look the same.
• rice — the rice vault: rice save / load / rollback. Snapshots your entire desktop, auto-backs-up before every swap, and reverts in one command. Your setup is a versioned artifact, not fragile dotfiles you pray over.
• Dot-switch + watchdog — flip between the two desktops with one key; a 30-second watchdog auto-reverts if a swap breaks. You physically cannot lock yourself out.
• bite-os-update (SUPER+U) — one-key full update (kernel / apps / AUR / rice) that re-asserts branding every time, so updates never decay it back to vanilla CachyOS. Optional, logged, asks first.
• Self-heal — a login healthcheck quietly rebuilds a wiped config. The OS fixes itself.
• Glitch mode (SUPER+B) — a LARP overlay: glitch shader, dedsec wallpaper, amber trace HUD and paced popups — engages and tears down cleanly, restoring your exact state.
• Wallpaper engine — single-instance VAAPI video wallpapers, an auto-pause daemon, a ghost-reaper so it never stacks, and wall-optimize to down-rate any wallpaper for lower idle CPU.

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◈ Custom Keybinds Matrix

The system maps directly to these custom core inputs for elite navigation:

Keybinding	Action	Execution Target
SUPER + B	Hacker Aesthetic Overlay	Triggers the "LARP" mode for full system cyber visual effects
SUPER + T	Open Terminal	Launches the pre-configured terminal environment instantly
SUPER + Q	Close Window	Safely terminates the active focused window
SUPER + ALT + SPACE	Toggle Floating Mode	Forces the active window into a floating layer
SUPER + BACKSPACE	Hot-Swap to Ilyamiro	Executes a rapid swap directly to the ilyamiro dots profile
CTRL + SUPER + D	Hot-Swap to Caelestia	Executes a rapid swap straight back to the caelestia dots profile
SUPER + R	Reload Waybar	Instantly recompiles and hot-reloads the Waybar panel
SUPER + U	Update BITE-OS	Full system update (kernel, apps, rice) with logs — stays BITE-OS

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◈ Download

The ISO (~5.1 GB) is hosted off-GitHub due to file-size limits.

➡ Download BITE-OS 1.0 (dedsec)

SHA256: ad977368e84aa5e2cebc44a7962b2197db24426258d40b88fb8c00769fd1eca5

Verify the download before flashing — anything that doesn't match this hash is not the ISO I built:

sha256sum bite-os-1.0-x86_64.iso

◈ Install

1. Flash the ISO to a USB (≥ 8 GB) with Impression, Ventoy, or dd.
2. Boot it. The ISO comes up straight into the BITE-OS installer — a dedicated, bulletproof installer environment (no desktop to fight, nothing to crash).
3. Click through it: language → keyboard → disk → your username + password → Install.
4. Reboot into your own riced BITE-OS — the full pre-riced Hyprland desktop, exactly as shipped.

No terminal required, no desktop to pick — BITE-OS installs as one opinionated, pre-riced Hyprland system, offline (no internet needed during install).

◈ Updating

BITE-OS keeps itself current and stays BITE-OS — updates never revert it to vanilla CachyOS.

• Press SUPER + U, or launch Update BITE-OS from the app menu, or run bite-os-update in a terminal.
• It updates everything (kernel, apps, AUR, the rice), is optional (asks first, only acts if there's something to do), and logs every run to ~/.local/state/bite-os/.

◈ Source

The core engineered logic — dot-switch + watchdog, self-repair, the live settings engine, the rice vault — lives in src/, readable and auditable with no build step. See src/README.md for the map.

◈ Packages & updates

BITE-OS is delivered as a native pacman package (bite-os) served from its own [bite-os] repo — so the whole system (rices, themes, dot-switch engine, glitch tooling, branding) updates the Arch-native way:

sudo pacman -Syu          # pull the latest BITE-OS alongside CachyOS/Arch updates

The bite-os package stages the rice vault and tooling into /etc/skel, so every fresh install boots fully riced. Branding is pinned by zz-bite-os-* pacman hooks that re-assert on every upgrade — system updates can't wash the identity out.

The [bite-os] repo is live, hosted on GitHub Releases, and wired into /etc/pacman.conf automatically on install — so SUPER+U / pacman -Syu pulls new BITE-OS releases straight from this repository.

◈ Build it yourself

BITE-OS is assembled from this repo on an Arch / CachyOS host:

bash repo/build-repo.sh        # build the bite-os package + local repo
sudo pacman -S --needed archiso
sudo bash build-iso.sh         # build the ISO -> out/

This builds BITE-OS itself (not a "make your own distro" template) — the rices, themes and tooling are all committed, so a fresh clone builds the full ISO. You'll need an Arch / CachyOS host with paru (it fetches the AUR dependencies during build-repo.sh). Most people should just grab the ISO above — building is for tinkerers who want to rebuild or fork it.

◈ License & Credit

BITE-OS is © 2026 GLITCH-BITE404 and released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (LICENSE). In short: you're free to use, study, share and modify it — but if you copy, fork, remix or redistribute BITE-OS you must credit the author (GLITCH-BITE404), link back to this repo, keep your version open-source under the same license, and not pass your fork off as the official BITE-OS. Full terms and the attribution requirements are in NOTICE.

The bundled upstream packages (Hyprland, CachyOS base, Calamares, caelestia, fonts, …) keep their own respective licenses.

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// THE SYSTEM BIT YOU — built by GLITCH-BITE404

🐕 Named after, and built for, a Shiba Inu named Laffy — meet him.