Grefsen is a Qt/Wayland compositor providing a minimal desktop environment.
- Qt 5.7: you need to build it from the git repo for now
- qtbase, qtdeclarative, qtwayland
- Qt.labs.controls AKA qtquickcontrols2
- QtQuick.Controls only for the calendar popover
- libQtXdg
- Arch Linux: install community/libqtxdg
- otherwise: build from github with Qt 5.7 and cmake
- for the Connman network manager popover (optional): libconnman-qt
- recommended: freefonts but hopefully your distro has that as a package
- the clock uses Manzanita, which is also installed as a resource in the executable, just in case
- WindsorDemi is another nice font, but it will fall back to others if that is not installed
qmake
make
mkdir ~/.config/grefsen
cp example-config/*.qml ~/.config/grefsen
Then modify to taste. If you want the wallpaper shown in the screenshot, download the full-resolution version from wikipedia to your ~/.config/grefsen directory.
It can run as a window inside an X11 session.
If you want to run it on the Linux console without an X11 session (which is much more efficient), you can use a startup script like this:
#!/bin/sh
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=eglfs
export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 # don't embiggen stuff on "high-res" displays
#export QT_QPA_EGLFS_PHYSICAL_WIDTH=480 # in case it's not detected
#export QT_QPA_EGLFS_PHYSICAL_HEIGHT=270 # or you wish to override
# try to restart if it crashes; write a log file
~/src/grefsen/grefsen -r -l /tmp/grefsen.log
The set of applications you can run inside is mostly limited to those that are built with Qt 5, so far. That includes a lot of KDE applications. It is intended to eventually be able to run weston and GTK3 apps too; that's mainly a matter of qtwayland having the XDG shell support finished. Grefsen does not include an embedded X server yet, but it might be possible.
The application menu uses libqtxdg to find .desktop files and .menu files in a way which is compliant with the XDG menu spec, which means that you have some control over the contents of the menu, if you don't mind editing XML files. But grefsen does not try to prevent you from running incompatible applications: they will simply fail to launch. So you might want a custom menu just for grefsen, whereas by default you will probably see all the same applications as you do in your usual desktop environment.
YAT is another terminal alternative. It's planned to have better touchscreen support soon (flicking with your finger, text selection when you drag a mouse), whereas konsole still doesn't.