Desktop sessions

The five sessions

Session	What it is	Runs Rime Shell
Rime Tiling	Hyprland, a tiling compositor. The default.	yes
Rime Scrolling	niri, which lays windows out in columns on a strip you scroll through.	yes
Rime Floating	labwc, a stacking compositor with title bars, like a traditional desktop.	yes
Rime Gaming Mode	Steam Big Picture inside gamescope, with no desktop underneath. Appears after you install gamescope.	no
Rime Safe Graphics	A minimal recovery desktop that renders on the CPU.	no

All five ship in the image except Gaming Mode’s packages, which you install yourself. See Gaming.

Picking one at the login screen

The login screen has a session picker. It chooses, in this order:

1. the session you pick in the picker;
2. Rime Safe Graphics, if your session died within 45 seconds three times in a row (a suggestion only; see Recovery);
3. the last session you used, if it is still installed;
4. Rime Tiling.

Moving between sessions always goes through the login screen, and there is no automatic login, so each switch asks for your password once.

Rime Shell detects which of the three desktops it runs on. If detection goes wrong, Settings, Misc lets you set it to Tiling, Scrolling or Floating.

Rime Tiling (Hyprland)

The default, and the session Rime Shell supports most fully.

• Windows open, move and change workspace on springs; a closing window shrinks away over 200 ms. Hyprland’s animations follow Rime Shell’s motion speed and Reduce Motion setting.
• SUPER with the left mouse button drags a window; SUPER with the right button resizes it. SUPER with the scroll wheel changes workspace.
• Ten workspaces, plus a scratchpad (SUPER+S).
• The tiling layout (dwindle, master, monocle or scrolling) shows in the top bar and can be cycled.
• Window corners are kept in line with the rounded frame around the screen.
• Filter in Quick Settings applies a screen shader, such as high contrast, grayscale or sepia.
• Alt+Tab opens Rime’s window switcher.
• Recording a new shortcut by pressing it works in Settings, Keybinds.
• Screenshots and recordings can pick a single window.

Rime Scrolling (niri)

• Workspaces are created as you need them.
• Alt+Tab is niri’s own window switcher.
• niri shows its “Important Hotkeys” overlay each time it starts. That is niri’s default, and Rime leaves it on.
• niri’s default configuration lives in ~/.config/niri/config.kdl, with its own bindings. Rime appends an include of the shell’s generated bindings at the end, so where both bind the same key, Rime Shell’s binding wins.
• Border colour and gaps come from config.kdl, not from the shell.

Not available here: the scratchpad, the tiling layout indicator, the Filter tile, recording a shortcut by pressing it, and window picking for screenshots.

Rime Floating (labwc)

• Windows float and have title bars, so the top bar reserves its full height.
• The left of the top bar shows a dock of up to five pinned or running windows.
• Alt+Tab is labwc’s own switcher, across every desktop.
• SUPER with an arrow key moves a window to that edge of the screen; SUPER+SHIFT with an arrow key snaps it to that edge. SUPER+SHIFT+SPACE keeps a window on top.
• The window border colour follows the wallpaper when the wallpaper changes.

Not available here: moving a window to another workspace from the shell, the scratchpad, the tiling layout indicator, the Filter tile, recording a shortcut by pressing it, and window picking for screenshots.

What is the same everywhere

On all three desktops you get the top bar, the Dashboard, the notification and network panels, the volume and brightness display in the notch, the lock screen, the workspace indicator, idle inhibit (Caffeine), Night Light, screenshots and screen recording. Shortcuts are edited in one place, Settings, Keybinds, and written for all three. See Keyboard shortcuts.

Rime Gaming Mode

Steam’s Big Picture interface runs inside gamescope, drawing straight to the display with no desktop compositor in the way. The login screen offers it only once gamescope is installed:

sudo rime install steam gamescope mangohud gamemode

Start it from the login screen, or from the power menu (the Rime mark at the top left): Gaming, then Enter Gaming Mode. That logs you out and returns to the login screen with Gaming Mode selected. When Steam quits, the session ends and the login screen comes back. See Gaming.

Rime Safe Graphics

A labwc session with its own read-only configuration, software rendering and no Rime Shell. It exists for when the graphics driver, the compositor configuration or the shell is broken. Right-click for a recovery menu. See Recovery.

On a machine installed from the v2.1.0 ISO

This page describes current Rime images. A machine installed from the v2.1.0 ISO runs an older APEX-OS image, with the apex command, until its first update. See Install Rime.