Selkies Desktop

Notice: Selkies Desktop is not intended for general consumption. It is not aiming to be a general-purpose Desktop Environment (DE) for people to use outside of its specific ecosystem.

Selkies Desktop is a dead-simple, purpose-built Wayland panel designed specifically to run inside Selkies containers on top of the labwc compositor.

Rather than being a highly configurable DE, this project intentionally utilizes hardcoded paths, fixed sizes, and baked-in styling to perfectly fit its intended environment. Its primary goal is to expand upon labwc's default right-click menu by providing a more traditional desktop experience, including:

• A categorized application launcher (Start Menu) reading from standard .desktop files.
• A persistent bottom panel and taskbar for better visual window management.
• A basic desktop background/wallpaper layer.
• Support for displaying and launching desktop icons mapped from ~/Desktop.

Reloading the UI

Selkies Desktop sets up an inotify watch to detect when it should refresh its internal application lists and redraw the UI. If you install a new application or modify the files in ~/Desktop, you can force a reload by touching the following trigger file:

touch ~/.config/panel-reload

Building

Install deps:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev libwayland-dev wayland-protocols curl

Compile from source:

git clone https://github.com/selkies-project/selkies-desktop.git
cd selkies-desktop
make

Run:

./selkies-desktop

License

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0).