SegLinux Rust desktop

This is the first implementation of SegLinux's own desktop shell. The shell is Rust with GTK4 Rust bindings; it is not a rewrite of the entire desktop stack in Rust. GTK, labwc, greetd and the bundled applications retain their upstream implementations. labwc handles composition, decorations, snapping, Alt+Tab and workspaces. Plasma remains an alternative session.

Implemented

Laid out like a Plasma desktop with a floating panel:

• Wallpaper: seglinux-dark.jpg, the SegLinux S drawn in ribbons of light by data/artwork/make-brand.py; the calmer seglinux-flow.jpg (data/artwork/make-wallpaper.py) is installed next to it.
• Desktop icons: the files and folders of ~/Desktop on the first monitor, folders first; double-click opens them with their default application (desktop entries start their application) and the icons follow changes to the folder. Right-click the desktop to open a terminal there, the Desktop folder, or the desktop settings.
• Floating dock: centred at the bottom, rounded and translucent, only as wide as its contents, on every monitor:
• Start (Super+Space), like Plasma's Kickoff: your name, search (names, descriptions and keywords; Enter starts the first result), Favorites (the dock's pins, in their order), All applications and the categories in use (Games, Internet, Multimedia, Graphics, Office, Development, ...), then Files, Settings, sign out, restart and shut down. Right-click an application (or press and hold) for its own actions (Brave's New Incognito Window), Pin to dock or Unpin from dock, and Add to desktop. The list follows installs: the desktop refreshes when applications are installed or removed, and ones installed since you first opened Start are marked New until you open them (the list of known applications is ~/.local/state/seglinux/known-apps);
• Show desktop: minimizes every window, or restores them;
• applications: pinned launchers and running windows share one icon per application (matched by Wayland app id), with a line under running ones and a highlight for the active one. Click to start, focus or minimize; click again to cycle through several windows; middle-click for a new window; right-click for the application's own actions, New window, Pin to dock or Unpin from dock, Move left / Move right and Close. Drag a pinned icon onto another to reorder them. Pins are the pinned list of shell.toml, so they can be changed in Settings too;
• tray, as Plasma's system tray: other applications' icons (Steam, Discord, Telegram, nm-applet... see below), network state (click for the connection editor, or nmtui), volume (click for the mixer, scroll to change, middle click to mute), battery on laptops, notifications, quick settings (sound, Bluetooth when the computer has it, display, lock, desktop settings, power) and the date and time (click for a calendar).
• Notifications: the desktop is the session's notification service (org.freedesktop.Notifications), so notifications from Brave, Steam, Discord, notify-send and every libnotify program appear, as in Plasma, as pop-ups at the bottom right above the dock: the application's icon and name, the title and text, and its buttons (Show in folder, Reply...). A click on one runs its default action; pointing at it keeps it on screen; critical ones (a nearly empty battery) stay until dismissed. The bell in the tray counts the unread ones and opens the history (newest first, Clear all) with Do not disturb, which keeps everything but critical notifications out of sight.
• Applications in the tray: the desktop is the session's system tray (StatusNotifierItem, which Qt, Electron and libappindicator/Ayatana programs use), so an application that hides in the tray when its window is closed, such as Steam or Discord, stays reachable. A click shows the application, a right click opens its menu (with submenus and check marks), a middle click runs its secondary action and scrolling is passed on. Icons asking for attention are highlighted.
• Volume and brightness keys: the change, then a level bar above the dock for a moment, as in Plasma. Volume keys raise (unmuting first), lower and mute the output; the microphone key mutes the input; the brightness keys change the screen's backlight in 5% steps, through elogind (no root needed, never fully dark).
• Terminal (Super+Enter, kitty): each new window or tab starts with system information under SegLinux's logo (fastfetch); fastfetch shows it again. Shells started from a shell, scripts, and the terminal panels of Dolphin and Kate skip it. To turn it off: mkdir -p ~/.config/seglinux && touch ~/.config/seglinux/no-fastfetch (delete that file to turn it back on). The look is /etc/xdg/fastfetch/config.jsonc; a config of your own in ~/.config/fastfetch/ replaces it.
• Sign-in screen (seglinux-greeter, Rust and GTK 4, in place of SDDM): the clock over the wallpaper, the accounts, the password and the desktop to start, preselecting the SegLinux desktop and the last account (see below); the Lite live session starts the desktop directly.
• labwc manages windows (decorations, snapping, Alt+Tab), like KWin under Plasma; without a usable GPU driver the session falls back to software rendering, then to wlroots' CPU renderer.
• Gaming: variable refresh rate and tearing for fullscreen games in labwc (adaptiveSync, allowTearing), and a separate SegLinux Gaming Mode session (Steam Big Picture in gamescope). See gaming.md.

Sign-in screen

SegLinux's sign-in screen is seglinux-greeter, a Rust (GTK 4) greeter for greetd, the small sign-in service that replaced SDDM. greetd starts it on the seventh console as its unprivileged greeter user, alone in a labwc compositor with no shortcuts and no menus (seglinux-greeter-session). It shows:

• the clock and date over the wallpaper, on every monitor;
• the people's accounts (several: a row to choose from; Other user for one not listed), and the password field, which warns when Caps Lock is on and says when the password is wrong;
• the desktop to start, bottom left: SegLinux, Plasma (Wayland), SegLinux Gaming Mode, ... (the sessions of /usr/share/wayland-sessions);
• Sleep, Restart and Shut down, bottom right.

greetd checks the password with PAM, as SDDM did; the greeter only passes it on. The account and desktop used last are preselected next time (/var/lib/seglinux-greeter/state.toml; Setup writes the first one). Ctrl+Alt+F2 still opens a text console.

Its look is set in /etc/seglinux/greeter.toml (as root):

wallpaper = "/usr/share/backgrounds/seglinux/seglinux-flow.jpg"
accent = "#e95420"          # sign-in button, focus rings, the round picture
clock_format = "%I:%M %p"   # 12-hour clock; "%H:%M" is 24-hour

Automatic sign-in (Setup's Sign in automatically, or autologin = true in an answer file) is greetd's [initial_session] in /etc/greetd/config.toml: that account's SegLinux desktop starts at boot, and signing out shows the sign-in screen. To turn it off, delete that section; to turn it on later, add it:

[initial_session]
command = "seglinux-session"
user = "alice"

Try it without signing out: seglinux-greeter --demo opens it in a window (the password demo "signs in" and prints the session it would start).

Systems installed from an older ISO keep SDDM until sudo seglinux-update has brought a SegLinux with the greeter (see updating.md): it then asks once whether to switch (OpenRC and dinit), and the new sign-in screen appears at the next restart, keeping SDDM's automatic sign-in if there was one. To switch by hand instead (OpenRC; for runit or dinit install greetd-runit or greetd-dinit and switch the services with their own tools):

sudo seglinux-update                       # brings seglinux-greeter (docs/updating.md)
sudo pacman -S --needed greetd greetd-openrc
sudo cp /usr/share/seglinux/greeter/greetd.toml /etc/greetd/config.toml
sudo install -d -o greeter -g greeter /var/lib/seglinux-greeter
sudo rc-update del sddm default && sudo rc-update add greetd default

and restart. To go back: sudo rc-update del greetd default && sudo rc-update add sddm default.

Try it without switching desktop

cargo run -p seglinux-shell -- --preview --wallpaper "$PWD/data/artwork/seglinux-dark.jpg"

Preview mode intentionally has no running-window integration and disables locking and power-off. Its launcher and shortcuts open real installed apps. Use the packaged SegLinux login session for the Wayland desktop. A compositor supporting layer-shell and foreign-toplevel is required.

Shortcuts

Settings

Press Super+I, open Settings from Start, or right-click the desktop (seglinux-shell --settings [appearance|desktop|windows|gaming|system]). Pages are listed on the left; Apply saves every page at once and the desktop uses the new settings immediately, without signing out. Restore page defaults shows the current page's defaults, saved on Apply.

• Appearance: dark or light theme; accent color (ten swatches or any hex color); text size; animations; the wallpaper (thumbnails of the installed ones, or any image) and how it fills the screen; the dock's opacity.
• Desktop & dock: desktop icons and their size; the dock at the top or bottom, its icon size, the Show desktop button and the battery percentage; the clock (presets or any strftime format, with a live preview); pinned applications: pin any installed application, reorder, unpin.
• Windows & input: focus follows the mouse, raise on focus, the gap around snapped windows, title bar roundness, 1 to 12 workspaces; keyboard layouts (several, with Alt+Shift, Ctrl+Shift or Caps Lock to switch), key repeat rate and delay, Num Lock; pointer speed and acceleration, natural scrolling, left-handed buttons, pointer size; touchpad tap-to-click, natural scrolling and disable-while-typing.
• Gaming: see gaming.md.
• System: the computer's system, kernel, processor, memory and graphics; the installed network, sound, display, Bluetooth, printer, Steam and Lutris tools (missing ones are disabled); the settings folder.

Apply checks every page before writing anything: an invalid value (such as #12345 for a color, or an unknown keyboard layout syntax) is reported with its page and nothing is saved. Only files whose content changed are written, atomically.

Where settings are stored

Generated files start with Managed by SegLinux Settings. Delete that line to keep your own version: Settings then leaves the file alone and says so. XDG_CONFIG_HOME is respected. /usr/share/seglinux/shell.example.toml lists every setting with its default.

The keyboard layout chosen during Setup is used until another one is set in Settings. These are settings of the SegLinux session; the Plasma session keeps its own.

Resource use

The desktop's idle footprint, re-measured on 13 October 2026 with release builds: labwc on a 1920×1080 headless output (CPU renderer), the shell started as the session's autostart does (GSK_RENDERER=cairo), and D-Bus, 25 seconds after start, then CPU over 60 seconds of idle:

CPU: 0.2% of one core. PSS counts each shared library once across the processes, which is the fair way to add them up; RSS counts GTK and the C library in every process. The 59 MB quoted on the website was measured the same way (PSS, on a virtual screen) when the shell moved to GTK's CPU renderer: shell 39.5 MB, labwc 16.4 MB, D-Bus 3 MB, 0.25% CPU. The live settings did not change it (55 MB before, 56 MB after, within noise), nor did the notifications, the tray for other applications and the volume display (re-measured on 14 October 2026: 56 MB). The number covers the desktop, not the whole system: the kernel, PipeWire, the polkit agent, Xwayland (when an X11 program runs) and services come on top. To check on your computer:

for p in labwc seglinux-shell dbus-daemon; do
  pid=$(pgrep -nx "$p") && grep -H '^Pss:' /proc/$pid/smaps_rollup
done

Current limitations

This is a young desktop, not KDE feature parity. It does not yet implement clipboard history, its own Bluetooth pairing screen (Quick settings opens Blueman or Plasma's), per-display wallpaper selection, moving, renaming or deleting desktop icons (use the Desktop folder in a file manager), dragging applications from Start onto the dock, window previews, per-monitor display arrangement (use the Displays tool) or full application theme editing. Network, sound, display management, file management and applications are existing Linux tools. Window buttons currently show all windows on all monitors. Hardware power management, suspend/resume, accessibility, locking, GPU compatibility and installation require full ISO/VM and hardware testing. The sign-in screen shows initials rather than account pictures, has no on-screen keyboard or layout switcher (it uses the layout chosen in Setup), and does not unlock KDE Wallet at sign-in as SDDM did.

Implementation references

• GTK4 Rust bindings
• gtk4-layer-shell
• labwc configuration

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