ML4W OS 2.14.0 Lands: A Quickshell Statusbar and Better Keyboard Layout Switching for Hyprland
The widely used dotfiles package for Hyprland just hit version 2.14.0, shipping a stack of workflow tweaks that target power users who spend more time pressing keys than chasing windows around. The update dropped June 28, 2026, and keeps the project's long-running migration toward a fully Quickshell-based interface on track.
If you haven't run into ML4W OS yet, it's essentially a one-command Wayland desktop built on top of Hyprland. Stephan Raabe's project ships a ready-to-go setup for Arch Linux, Fedora, and openSUSE Tumbleweed, complete with a wallpaper-adaptive color theme that pulls palettes straight from your desktop background. You don't need to wrestle with config files to get a functional desktop. You just paste an install command into a terminal and wait.
The new shortcuts and the missing sidepad
The update focuses on things that usually take hours to patch together manually. You can now toggle an optional Quickshell statusbar and expand it with a hover or SUPER + SPACE. Dock autohide gets its own sidebar toggle, which is a relief given how often Wayland docks fight with tiling layouts. Multi-layout keyboard switching lands via ALT + SHIFT, and you configure your layouts directly in input.lua.
Powermenu navigation finally works with arrow keys and Enter, which sounds like a no-brainer until you've fumbled through a QML menu at 2 AM. Special workspaces get a dedicated SUPER + SHIFT + S shortcut, and the whole set gets fresh SVG icons.
The sidepad is temporarily pulled from the build. The changelog states it will be replaced by a new scratchpad feature, though the exact timeline for that swap is still up in the air.
A heavy stack for a dotfiles project
The project runs on a fairly heavy codebase for what amounts to a configuration repository. Quickshell and QML now make up 46.4 percent of the lines of code, with shell scripts and CSS trailing behind. The adaptive theming engine uses Matugen to feed color values into Waybar, Kitty, SwayNC, and the lock screen, which is why the screenshots always look so cohesive. It also ships with nwg-dock-hyprland, a Rofi launcher, and a full Live ISO if you want to test the waters before overwriting your system.
It's a polished package, though the configuration surface area is getting wide. New users will juggle the Sidebar app, the Welcome app, the Settings app, and raw config files without clear boundaries. The rolling release branch is also locked to Hyprland 0.55.x right now, which means it will break the moment upstream ships 0.56. Not a dealbreaker, but something to keep in mind if you track bleeding-edge Wayland updates.
ML4W OS 2.14.0 is available through the official install script on Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE Tumbleweed, or you can grab the ISO straight from the project site. If you're building your own Hyprland setup from scratch, it might be worth a look just to steal the Lua config patterns and the Matugen pipeline.
