/projects/wumbos
wumbOS
A developing Linux desktop environment centered on Hyprland, Quickshell, and local-first Agent integration.
MAIN FOCUS / ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT
wumbOS is a developing Linux desktop environment / desktop shell centered on Hyprland, Quickshell, a cohesive WumboLabs desktop experience, local-first Agent integration, and practical workstation use. It integrates proven Linux components rather than replacing them first. It is not yet a separately distributable operating system: today's releases are a signed component/composition set plus a qualified live ISO, and the first independently installable distro alpha is still ahead.
The website distinguishes the public baseline from current development. The current public baseline is the signed wumbOS v0.2.0-alpha.1 composition, which pins the Shell (WumboLabs/wumbo-quickshell v0.2.0-alpha.1) and the wumbosd daemon (WumboLabs/wumbosd v0.1.0-alpha.1). Current prealpha work is active and has not shipped as a public release.
Current Status
The v0.2.0-alpha.1 composition is a functional desktop stack, not a mockup. The Shell was tested with Hyprland 0.56.2 and Quickshell 0.2.1, plus Qt 6, PipeWire/WirePlumber, NetworkManager, and systemd/logind on Fedora 44. Hyprland is required. These are tested versions, not minimum-version promises.
Current development continues on the same Fedora 44 / Hyprland workstation stack. Unreleased Agent, Control Panel, and visual work is not part of the published v0.2.0-alpha.1 baseline unless a later public release says so.
Shell-First Desktop
wumbOS Shell keeps persistent chrome compact: a top bar is created dynamically for each connected display. It presents workspaces, active-window state, date and weather, Attention and Agent status, audio, networking and DNS information, system status, GPU information, tray, power/session controls, launcher, and clipboard access. Related details live in coordinated contextual popups rather than becoming permanent bar modules.
Multi-monitor behavior is deliberate: bars follow connected displays without hard-coded connector names, and popup ownership follows the target monitor. Multi-monitor operation was live-tested. Single-monitor operation is structurally supported but has not received equivalent live qualification.
Sandstone Night
The canonical current visual direction is Sandstone Night. It supersedes the earlier Copper Bench / dual-theme experiment.
The unified Sandstone Night shell palette spans the shell's own surfaces — top bars, popups, Control Panel, lock screen — with terminal/tooling integration, wallpaper treatment, and broader workstation visual consistency as continuing work. External GTK, Qt, compositor, and application theming remains outside the shell's current theme boundary.
Sandstone Night is the shipped default in the v0.2.0-alpha.1 Shell. The released Shell theme system (v1) ships a curated set of five selectable dark themes — Sandstone Night (default), Catppuccin Mocha, Gruvbox Dark, Nord, and Tokyo Night — selectable from Settings and persisted per installation. Current unreleased visual work continues beyond it.
Control Panel
The earlier System Monitor popup has evolved into Control Panel.
In current prealpha work, Control Panel is becoming the broader native wumbOS status and configuration surface. That evolution is in development. It does not mean every planned Control Panel capability exists today.
Agent-Aware Workstation
Agent activity is treated as workstation state rather than chatbot branding.
The released Shell's supported Agent harness integrations are optional OMP and Hermes. OMP was tested with OMP 17.2.11; it reads structured Agent state and can represent running, tool activity, waiting, blocked, completed, failed, and idle states when the harness supplies them. OMP does not reliably expose every ordinary human-question waiting transition, so the shell does not invent one from timers, CPU use, unread state, or Attention.
Current development is working on a shared Agent layer that can represent multiple local coding/AI harnesses through one desktop-native status and Attention system. That foundation is unreleased. It is not part of the published v0.2.0-alpha.1 baseline.
OMP
OMP remains the established Agent integration. Truthful missing state is better than heuristic confidence. No additional OMP capabilities are claimed beyond the tested public boundary.
Codex
Codex integration research is experimental. Bounded app-server lifecycle qualification exists, but ordinary Codex CLI/TUI 0.147.0 does not expose a suitable privacy-safe owner-session interface for normal live wumbOS monitoring. Normal Codex monitoring remains inactive / deferred pending a suitable privacy-safe owner-session interface.
Do not read this as “Codex supported.”
Grok Build
Grok Build integration is active research against qualified local version 1.0.4. Current findings support authoritative persistent session identity, qualified identity/lifecycle semantics, and the feasibility of privacy-safe metadata projection. Production owner/session event integration is not complete.
Do not read this as “Grok supported.” Inactive is not the same as disconnected, and heartbeat/freshness behavior is not claimed as proven.
Attention and Architecture
Attention asks: “What needs me?” Today it is a notification-centered foundation. The optional wumbosd service provides deeper notification and Attention state. wumbosd is now a public WumboLabs repository (WumboLabs/wumbosd, MPL-2.0, alpha v0.1.0-alpha.1): optional for standalone Shell use — the standalone Shell artifact does not bundle it — and a required component of every wumbOS composition release. The shell continues without it, hiding or restoring dependent surfaces cleanly as the service disappears or returns.
Quickshell / QML
public optional / composition-required session service
signed composition · RPM repository · live ISO · installer next
System Integration
Integrate first. Own later.
Hyprland remains the compositor and window manager. PipeWire/WirePlumber remain audio authority. NetworkManager remains network authority. Nemo remains the current proven file manager. Fedora/Linux infrastructure stays where replacing it adds no meaningful product value.
Control Panel
Current prealpha work is expanding Control Panel beyond the earlier System Monitor telemetry popup. GPU identification remains available; NVIDIA has the strongest enhanced path through optional nvidia-smi. Missing telemetry must not break the shell.
Desktop services
Audio integrates with PipeWire and WirePlumber. Networking uses normal Linux infrastructure including NetworkManager, nmcli, resolver information, resolvectl, and ip.
Defined boundaries
Modern StatusNotifierItem and AppIndicator-style tray interfaces are supported. Legacy XEmbed-only tray applications are not. Weather uses Open-Meteo and Zippopotam.us with location state stored locally.
Status Matrix
Roadmap
hyprsunset first, module visibility, and diagnostics.liveinst from the live ISO — partitioning, user creation, bootloader, and wumbos-desktop from the signed repositories, rebooting into installed wumbOS. This closes the ISO-Qualified maturity level.Housekeeper product concept
Housekeeper is intended to become the first major native wumbOS desktop Agent: a local Agent that helps organize and maintain the user's filesystem.
Example intents: clean up Downloads, find project-related reports, find duplicate ISOs, find related files scattered across directories, and identify files that appear misplaced.
The LLM does not receive unrestricted shell or filesystem authority.
Local model → typed Housekeeper capabilities → deterministic filesystem capability broker → filesystem.
Housekeeper begins local / offline first. Interaction concept: request → plan → review → apply → undo available.
The core product gate is whether a fully local Housekeeper can understand messy files, propose sensible organization, execute safely, and undo mistakes. That must be proven before remote-provider complexity is added.
Audio Panel v2
Status: PLANNED.
Initial direction: enumerate active PipeWire/WirePlumber playback streams, identify applications currently producing audio, provide per-source volume and mute, let streams appear and disappear live, and retain master output control.
Future expansion may include recording/input clients, grouping, per-stream output-device routing, saved routing preferences, and optional source/application focus.
Use existing PipeWire/WirePlumber state and events. Do not create a duplicate custom audio daemon.
Fast, Light, Event-Driven
wumbOS should grow in capability without accumulating unnecessary background work.
- Prefer events before polling.
- Share data and state instead of duplicating collectors.
- Lazy-load expensive UI.
- No always-on local LLM by default.
- Do not create a daemon when an existing Linux service owns the problem.
- Do not periodically spawn subprocesses when native events or APIs exist.
- Every background workload needs a reason to exist.
- Optimization claims require measurement.
- Stability and responsiveness matter more than synthetic minimum-RAM bragging.
- Useful functionality should not be removed only to lower a benchmark number.
Examples: PipeWire events for audio, a shared stats provider, Agent adapters that publish state, Housekeeper models loaded on demand, and File Intelligence that is event-driven and resource-budgeted.
Known Public-Baseline Boundaries
Tested support and current limitations
- Tested v0.2.0-alpha.1 stack: Fedora 44, Wayland, Hyprland 0.56.2, Quickshell 0.2.1, Qt 6, PipeWire/WirePlumber, NetworkManager, and systemd/logind.
- Other Wayland compositors, KDE, and GNOME are unsupported. Older and newer Hyprland and Quickshell versions are unqualified.
- A stationary-pointer popup retarget behavior exists on the tested Hyprland/Quickshell stack; Escape, click-away, switching popups, and slight pointer movement remain practical close paths.
- OMP and Hermes are the supported Agent harness integrations; the ordinary human-question waiting state cannot always be represented.
- Codex is not a supported live monitoring integration. Grok Build is research, not a supported production integration.
- Enhanced AMD and Intel GPU telemetry are not implemented; XEmbed-only tray applications are unsupported; wumbosd is not bundled in the standalone Shell artifact (it is a required composition component).
- Housekeeper, File Intelligence, the native file manager, provider-backed reasoning, and published installable distro media are not current shipping features.
Development Discipline
wumbOS makes narrow support claims, centralizes state where practical, and treats graceful degradation as a core requirement. Real interaction behavior overrides static reasoning; brittle delays, synthetic input, and per-component hacks are not substitutes for correct architecture.
The public alpha line was validated through license and privacy review, clean archive and simulated-install checks, dependency/import checks, live shell and session-integrity validation, release-candidate work, and public-clone review. Public main is intended to represent something an outside user can reasonably install. Current prealpha branches are development, not a substitute for that public baseline.
Open Source Public Alpha
wumbOS Shell is available under MPL-2.0. The wumbOS system spans three public repositories — the Shell (WumboLabs/wumbo-quickshell), the daemon (WumboLabs/wumbosd), and the signed OS composition (WumboLabs/wumbos) — all under MPL-2.0. wumbOS v0.2.0-alpha.1 is the current public baseline: signed composition, component releases, a signed RPM repository, and a qualified live ISO exist today. The installer (D6) and the first independently installable distro alpha (D10) are the next distribution milestones.