fyzugx/DEsk

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v0.1.1 (BETA) -- fixes to v0.1, the first public release. See RELEASE-NOTES.md.

I've created a Discord server! You can also report bugs and submit ideas for new features here! link : https://discord.gg/xR5f7Xs49

DEsk is Desktop Environment and desk in one word -- a name that came from the Reddit community. It used to be called DeskWM: the commands are now desk, desk-session, desk-settings and so on, and what was set up for DeskWM (its settings, its data, DESKWM_* variables) carries over by itself.

A Wayland desktop for Linux in realistic skeuomorphism -- the kind iOS 6 had, where everything on the screen is drawn to look like the real thing. Here the desktop is a desk.

Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk. The dock is a drawer, your apps are filed in binders on a bookshelf behind the desk, notifications arrive in a post box, and the system controls are a panel built into the back of the desk. The room is ray-traced, and one desk lamp lights all of it.

Status: beta. DEsk is used day to day on its author's machines and has been checked carefully (see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, section 9), but this is its first release: expect rough edges, and expect things to change. Your settings and data will be carried forward.

Download the latest release from the Releases page and unpack it (or clone this repository). Then, in its folder, run the line for your system:

Debian 13

sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh

Ubuntu 24.04 / 26.04 (and Linux Mint, Pop!_OS)

sudo sh scripts/install_ubuntu.sh

Arch Linux (and EndeavourOS, Manjaro)

sudo sh scripts/install_arch.sh

Then log out and choose DEsk on the login screen.

• It shows what it will install and asks first. --yes takes the suggested answers; --no-apps installs DEsk without the recommended programs.
• The first login draws the room once: a few seconds on a GPU, longer without one. After that it starts at once.
• To update, get the new release and run the same line again. Your settings are kept.
• Something went wrong? See Reporting a problem.

More options, building by hand and running DEsk in a window are under Build and Run.

Nothing here is a symbol for a thing on a desk. As in the realistic skeuomorphism of iOS 6, each is drawn to look like the real thing set down there -- its material, the light on it, its shadow and the wear of use.

• Windows are paper. Each window sits on a cream sheet with real fibre, thickness and a dog-eared corner. Hold the pointer on the corner and it lifts to show what is printed on the back: Fold (minimize: folded like a letter and left on the desk, under the windows as paper put down is), Unfold / Refold (maximize and restore), and Discard (close: crumpled into a ball and tossed). Dragging an edge pulls more paper out from behind the sheet.
• The drawer is the dock. Pull the brass handle (or press Super+D). It holds the things you put in it: any app, or a folded window. Out of the box it holds DEsk's standard programs (below) and a screwdriver that opens Shell Settings.
• The bookshelf holds your apps (Super+A, or the ALL APPS plate). Each category is a ring binder whose sheets fan from a single ring. Take a sheet and it is carried down to the desk, where the app's window opens on it. At the end of the row stands an ALL APPS index book: every program from A to Z, with thumb tabs and a line at the top of the page to type into (input methods via IBus work).
• The post box is the notification centre (Super+N). Letters show the sender and subject, and a letter taken out lies on the desk.
• The Control Panel (Super+C) is a valve-era machine built into the back of the desk: real meters, a volume knob, network and Bluetooth levers, a fader for the room's lamp and one for the screen's own backlight (on a laptop, through logind; the brightness keys work too), a key to unlock the power buttons, and the system tray as paper slips under it (more than fit, and the wheel slides the row along).
• A desk calendar, a desk memo pad and a clock stand on the shelf. The calendar has a notebook of plans and to-dos, and notes are peeled off and stuck onto the day. The memo pad is taken down the same way and written on (IBus works there too); its sheets turn over the wire. The clock shows the seconds small beside the minutes, under two lamps that light only while a camera or a microphone is in use.
• The front door is out in the real world. The lock screen's door has the hour's light -- the sun worked out from your time zone's city, the porch lamp coming on at dusk -- and, if you let it ask open-meteo.com for that city's weather (only its latitude and longitude are sent), the weather: rain darkening the brick and streaking past the lamp, snow settling on what faces up, fog, lightning. And on certain days of the year the door and the clock have something more for you -- there is no setting for it; what it is, you will see on the day (give Shell Settings your birthday, and that is one of them). Esc stops it.
• Light. The room (desk, shelf, console, post box) is ray-traced on the GPU (GLES 3), with a CPU tracer as the fallback, and cached per screen size. Everything drawn over it is lit by the same lamp. At login the room starts dark and the lamp comes up as the room is made, while the clock counts how far in glowing red.
• Sizes are in points. A bigger screen is a bigger desk, not bigger things.
• More than one screen. The desk is on one screen; every other shows more of the desk's boards, running on from it, for windows to lie on. A new window comes onto the screen the pointer is on, Unfold and full screen fill the screen the window is on, and nothing the desk's own screen does -- the drawer, turning to the bookshelf -- moves what lies on the others or takes it out of reach. A screen taken away puts its windows on one that is left.
• X11 apps run through Xwayland, and windows that draw their own frames sit on paper too.
• The screen lock is the front door (Super+L, or logind): you walk up to it at night, close enough to touch, traced in 3D with its own lamps and soft shadows. Your picture and name are on the board hung on it, the password goes in at the brass plate, the key beside it; on Return (or a click on the key) you lean in and turn the key. Let in, it goes round, the door swings open, you walk through into the room and sit down at the desk; told no, it will not turn. Locking is the same run backwards -- out of the room, the door shut, the key turned -- from Super+L or the blue LOCK button on the Control Panel. Checked with PAM, as at login.
• Seven languages. Everything DEsk prints itself, and the names of programs, are in English, Japanese, Chinese (simplified), Korean, Spanish, French or German: the locale's, or language = en | ja | zh | ko | es | fr | de in ~/.config/desk/shell.conf (or the Shell Settings app), and switch live. The calendar is printed as one sold there is, and Chinese and Korean are set in their own cut of the CJK faces.

DEsk is meant to be installed as a whole desktop, like GNOME or KDE, so it picks a standard program for each job the desk has: a terminal, a web browser, a file manager and a text editor. The drawer's things and Super+Enter open them. For each job, the first of these that is there:

1. app.terminal, app.browser, app.files, app.editor in shell.conf (a .desktop id),
2. the default-applications lists in the freedesktop.org order: ~/.config/desk-mimeapps.list (DEsk only), ~/.config/mimeapps.list (what Shell Settings' Default programs, xfce4-mime-settings, writes), and the same two in the system's folders, ending with the desk-mimeapps.list installed with DEsk -- the same answers xdg-open and GIO give,
3. the standard set, classic GTK programs first: Xfce Terminal, Firefox ESR, Thunar, Mousepad (then MATE Terminal, Caja, Pluma, and so on),
4. any program filed under the right category.

The corner of every window: Fold, Unfold, Discard.	The drawer: the dock.
A folded window, lying on the desk under the others.	The bookcase behind the desk.
ALL APPS, every program from A to Z ...	... and a line to type into.
The Control Panel.	The post box: notifications.
The desk calendar and its notes.	Shell Settings.

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md -- how DEsk is built: the programs, the compositor, the ray-traced room, threads, files.
• docs/MODDING.md -- changing DEsk: words and languages, settings, borrowed programs, sounds, the room, things on the desk.
• docs/CONFIGURATION.md -- every setting, file and environment variable.
• RELEASE-NOTES.md -- what is in v0.1.1 and what is known not to work yet.
• docs/design.md -- the full development log (in Japanese).

DEsk draws the desk; the work done on it is done with free software that already exists. It reaches completeness by borrowing, and keeps a firm line between what it makes and what it borrows:

The rule for new cases: make only what is drawn as part of the room or can only be done inside the compositor; otherwise find an existing program that works as it is under a wlroots compositor, and make something only as a last resort. KDE's System Settings and kcmshell (which do not work outside Plasma), Xfce's and MATE's X11-only dialogs, and Xfce's display and appearance dialogs (which need xfsettingsd, and xfsettingsd overwrites GSettings with Xfce's defaults as it starts) are not used.

sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh     # DEsk and the whole set (install_ubuntu.sh, install_arch.sh)
sh scripts/install-desktop.sh         # only the programs (shows them, then asks for sudo)
sh scripts/install-desktop.sh --extras   # and the office suite, mail...

install-desktop.sh works with apt, dnf, pacman and zypper. On Debian and Ubuntu the same set is also one package: equivs-build packaging/debian/desk-desktop.equivs.

The classic GTK programs of Xfce and MATE come first because they are the kind of window the desk's paper is cut for -- a menu bar, plain tools and the document -- and they are light, start quickly and run on Wayland as they are. GTK 3 asks the compositor for its frame through KDE's server-decoration protocol, so they lie on DEsk's paper with its printed heading and no GTK title bar. Windows with a header bar (GNOME's programs, Firefox) keep their own frame, inside a paper margin.

Shell Settings (desk-settings) holds DEsk's own settings -- windows, the size of things, how much is drawn, language, clock, your birthday and the weather, when the screen goes off and whether the desk locks then -- on its Shell tab, and on its System tab rows that open the borrowed programs (network, Bluetooth, sound, displays, printers, the look of other programs, default programs, disks, disk usage, colour profiles, the input method, date and time, your name and picture, users, passwords and keys, adding and removing programs, backups, what the computer is doing, and the Experience Index), classic-looking programs first, each with the program's own icon and its name -- "Displays (wdisplays)" -- so you can see what does the setting. A row whose program is not installed is printed faint with the package to install, by this distribution's name. The two tabs sit on the sheet like a folder's index tabs, and in each pocket is a wire-bound pad with a sheet to each part of the form and a sticky note on each sheet's edge; taking hold of a note turns the sheets over the wire to it, as on the desk calendar (Page Up and Down too). Changing tab (a click, Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+Page Up/Down) draws the other pad up out of the folder from below, and the pad comes up the same way when the window opens.

Started as a session (desk-session, from a login screen), DEsk tells D-Bus and systemd where its display is, runs the XDG autostart entries (leaving out the ones that would fight it, such as another notification daemon or an X screen locker), and starts an authentication agent, the keyring, the input method and the network applet with whichever free program for each is installed. The input method's candidates come up under the text being written -- in a program's window as on the desk's own pages -- and leave the keys where they are. It turns the screen off when nobody is at the desk (locking first, by default), lets video players keep it on, and speaks wlr-output-management (wdisplays, wlr-randr, kanshi), remembering a display tool's arrangement for each set of screens. Logging out, restarting and powering off ask every window to close first, so a program with unsaved work can ask about it; a window that does not close holds it up and is put in front.

Shell Settings also sets what only a Wayland compositor can: tap to click, natural scrolling, pointer speed and left-handed buttons (through libinput), the keyboard layout, a second layout and the keys that change to it, and key repeat -- applied at once to what is plugged in.

How much the desk draws is a setting too, Graphics: Ultra (the room traced finer, and wider where a GPU can, and nothing drawn coarser while it moves), High (as made, the default), Medium, Low, and 2D Fallback -- for a machine without a GPU or a virtual machine rendering on its CPU: no shadows, nothing fading, blurred or moving, nothing ray-traced as it moves, and the room traced once, small and plain. On two CPU cores without a GPU the first start goes from nearly ten minutes to about a quarter of a minute, and a frame from 2 ms to 0.5 ms. The installer takes a quick look at the machine (desk-index --suggest: the graphics, or the processor, for a couple of seconds, the threads and the memory, and how long the processor takes to draw a sheet of paper folding) and picks the level for it, as the machine's default (/etc/xdg/desk/shell.conf); each user's own choice wins.

Where the screen is drawn by the processor -- no GPU, a virtual machine without 3D, a GPU without its driver -- the desk runs in 2D Fallback unless you choose a level yourself, and says so: a letter in the post box (check the graphics drivers, or the virtual machine's settings) and a line in red beside Graphics in Shell Settings. 2D Fallback is the same desk with its effects off, not a second one, its room traced at a sample a pixel and softened. And a first start, which traces the room from nothing, leaves a letter in the middle of the desk saying it may take a minute or two, more on some machines, and that the desk can be used meanwhile.

It is meant to stay light on old machines. Measured on a machine held to about a 2010 laptop's pace (a quarter of a core each on two cores, 2 GB, no GPU for the room): a later login shows the desk in under half a second and has the light on in 1.4 s; the very first one, which has to trace the room on the processor, shows a soft first look and the light within seven seconds instead of a minute and a half in the dark; folding a sheet costs 5 ms a frame at Low. The traced room is kept across updates, and paper in motion is drawn finer or coarser by the level (whole at High, half at Low).

Programs on the desk are dressed for it too: DEsk's own icons, drawn to look like the real things set down on the desk, the way iOS 6 drew them -- manila card folders with papers in them, a typed page with its corner turned down, a letter signed in blue ink, a ledger, slides in their mounts, instant photos, a record sliding out of its sleeve, a film slate, a taped carton for an archive, a deck of punched cards for a program, a block of wood type for a font, a wire wastebasket you see through, a brass globe for the network, a drive in its aluminium case -- with the grain of paper, card, wood and brushed metal and the shadows they cast; and a GTK theme of paper, ink and brass. They are set in a dconf layer of DEsk's own over the user's, so another desktop on the same machine keeps its look.

When something on the desk gets stuck: Ctrl+Alt+Del twice puts everything of the desk's own away and draws it all again (the windows stay as they are); three times logs out. desk-ctl reset and desk-ctl logout do the same from a terminal or another VT.

desk-index rates the machine at what the desk asks of it, the way the Windows Experience Index did: processor, memory, 2D graphics (the desk's own drawing), 3D graphics (the room's shader, checked against the CPU) and disk, each 1.0-9.9, on brass-rimmed meters; the base score is the lowest. desk-index --text prints the same in a terminal.

The simplest way is the installer for your distribution (below), which brings everything. To build it yourself:

• wlroots 0.18 (Debian 13 has it; Ubuntu 24.04 has 0.17, Ubuntu 26.04 only 0.19 and Arch only 0.20, so the installers build 0.18.3 from its release into /opt/desk-wlroots, used by DEsk alone through its run path)
• wayland, wayland-protocols, xkbcommon, cairo, pixman, fontconfig, libdrm, PAM
• libsystemd (optional): the notification daemon and the system tray. Build with -Dpost=disabled to leave them out.
• libpulse (optional): the desk's sounds (-Dsound=disabled)
• libinput (optional): touchpad and mouse settings
• EGL, GLES, gbm (optional): ray-trace the room on the GPU. Without them the CPU does it.
• Xwayland and xcb (optional): X11-only apps.
• Fonts: the URW base 35 (fonts-urw-base35) and Noto CJK (fonts-noto-cjk); fonts-klee for the memo pad.
• At run time: grim for screenshots, curl for the weather at the door.

Measured with the CPU, GPU and memory cut down (systemd-run CPUQuota and MemoryMax, taskset; nested, 1440x900, the same hand moves every run). Once the room is traced, even one core without a GPU dropped no frames; a frame costs about 2 ms. Only the first login traces the room: 6-9 s on a GPU, about 10 minutes on two cores without one (then it is cached).

meson setup build
meson compile -C build

Inside your current session, as a window:

./build/desk -s foot

As a session of its own, picked from the login screen (GDM, SDDM, LightDM), use the installer for your system (Install). All three take the same options:

sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh              # or install_ubuntu.sh, install_arch.sh
sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh --no-apps    # DEsk, what it needs and what Shell Settings opens
sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh --bare       # DEsk and what it needs, no programs (containers)
sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh --prefix /opt/desk

sh scripts/install_session.sh picks the right one by itself and keeps what it says in ~/.local/state/desk/install.log. Each installer does the same (derivatives such as Mint, Pop!_OS, EndeavourOS and Manjaro are recognised): packages, a release build in build-install, the PAM file, the login entry, and the removal of what the old name, DeskWM, left behind (after asking). Every program Shell Settings' System tab opens is installed, --no-apps or not, and at the end desk-settings --check lists what each row opens (or which package would bring it). On other distributions, install the requirements and run scripts/install.sh. Or from a TTY: desk-session.

To update, get the new copy and run the installer again the same way ("this updates it", it says): what is installed is replaced, the last build is reused (or made afresh when it cannot be), and your settings and the traced room stay. All the installer says is also kept in ~/.local/state/desk/install.log (the last run's) -- the thing to look at, or send, if it stops part way. A copy made for passing round carries SHA256SUMS, and the installer checks every file against it before building: a copy damaged on its way says which files are wrong and stops (copy it again; if a fresh copy is damaged too, suspect the machine's memory or disk -- memtest86+). A Japanese locale gets the Mozc converter among the suggested programs; IBus itself is installed for everyone but only runs for languages typed through an input method, or when one is set up.

The first start at a new screen size spends a little while ray-tracing the room, on the GPU the screen is drawn with: the desk first, then the bookcase, the Control Panel and the post box, each there to turn to as soon as its picture is, and last the films of the camera moves to them (until a film is done, the move to its view is a cut). Each part is cached as it is done, so a first start cut short picks up where it stopped. What DEsk says as it runs is kept in ~/.local/state/desk/session.log (the session before in session.log.old); its desk: room: lines say what the room was traced on and how long each part took -- the thing to send if a start is slow. A GPU is tried once, in a child process, before the room is traced on it; one that fails says why (failed its trial: ...), and the processor traces the room instead -- at High's quality even where Ultra is chosen, Ultra's being a GPU's to trace.

Please say which version (desk --version) and which Linux, what you did and what happened, and attach:

• ~/.local/state/desk/session.log (and session.log.old if the problem was in the session before) -- what DEsk said as it ran;
• if the installer stopped, its last lines from the terminal (or ~/.local/state/desk/install.log when it was run through install_session.sh).

Both are plain text; look them over before sending them. If the desk is stuck, desk-ctl reset from a terminal (or another VT) draws everything again without closing your windows.

DEsk was built with the help of AI. Much of the code and the documentation was written by Claude (Anthropic's AI model) under the author's direction: the author decided what DEsk should be and how it should look, tested it on real machines, and reviewed what went in. Reports and patches are welcome all the same.

MIT