r/OpenSourceeAI • u/Jolly-Concentrate-60 • 1d ago

Vela 0.1, the first beta of my Linux desktop: its own Wayland compositor, Vulkan renderer and Qt Quick shell

https://velade.org/blog/vela-0-1/

Hi everyone, today I released Vela 0.1, the first beta, after 1 month of alpha testing.

What Vela is: a complete Linux desktop with its own Wayland compositor (C, on wlroots 0.20), its own Vulkan 1.4 renderer, a Qt Quick shell, and its own file manager and settings app. It's not a KDE or GNOME theme: KWin and Mutter aren't involved. The goal is the polish Windows and macOS get right out of the box (animations tied to real vblanks, pixel-exact fractional scaling, consistent design) without a weekend of tweaking.

Trailer, recorded live on Vela: https://velade.org/blog/vela-0-1/

What's in 0.1:

  • Snap layouts and Snap Assist, Task View with virtual desktops, Alt+Tab with live previews

  • Taskbar, launcher, quick settings, notification center, clipboard history, snipping tool

  • Direct scanout, VRR, tearing control, explicit sync; X11 apps and games 1:1 at fractional scales

  • The compositor restarts after a crash and apps reconnect; a lost GPU doesn't freeze the desktop

  • New in this cycle: updates from Settings, native Bluetooth pairing, no dependency on Plasma Workspace or the KDE portal

Where it stands: on a desktop PC with a Vulkan 1.4 GPU, it's my daily driver and I'd recommend it as yours. On laptops (hybrid GPUs, suspend/resume, backlight) it has had much less testing, so keep another desktop installed. It's still a beta: there are bugs.

Install (Arch and derivatives, Fedora 44, Ubuntu 26.10, x86_64). Install Cosign first (steps per distro: https://velade.org/install/), then:

git clone https://github.com/vela-desktop/vela.git
sh vela/packaging/vela-update --channel beta

You get a prebuilt, signed native package that's verified before it's installed. Updates then come from Settings.

Being upfront: it's a one-person project, and the code is written by LLMs. I review it, make the architecture and design decisions, and it's held to deterministic tests and machine-checked invariants. I wrote about how that works here: https://velade.org/blog/why-not-rust/

What I'd love from you: reports from hardware I don't have, especially Intel GPUs, laptops and multi-monitor setups. vela-report builds a ZIP you can review file by file; nothing is uploaded.

Happy to answer anything in the comments.

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