starling

Starling keeps the familiar 2D desktop and adds a walkable 3D waterfront city. Open the control panel and choose 3D Desktop to change perspectives. The city includes moving boats, traffic and clouds, a clock tower, sunset lighting, and cream, bronze and sage window chrome.

Your apps, in the city

Chrome, Video Player, Files, Terminal and the other desktop apps remain real windows. Switch between them with Alt + Tab, or bring a live preview forward from the rail. Double-click a window's outer title bar to center the view on it. Popups follow their parent window in the scene.

Each display has its own scene and camera. Walking, turning or pointer-driven parallax on one display leaves the other display's view unchanged. Scene rendering shares a backend while keeping each output's camera and render target independent.

Remote desktops

Windows through WSL2 with Ubuntu 26.04 (amd64) is supported. The city runs through RDP display mode. When the RDP viewer leaves, ambient animation stops; connecting again resumes it. The release gate checks idle CPU before and after a connection, visible city motion, and motion after reconnecting.

Website and demo

The website is now a single desktop showcase, styled with the city's palette. It includes real 2D/3D captures, a narrated demo with original music and captions, and Ubuntu and WSL installation instructions. The film walks from an empty desktop to the waterfront, then launches and switches between Chrome, Video Player, Files and Terminal.

Install

The package targets Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, amd64, on a PC or in Windows through WSL2. Graphics have been tested with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, plus VirtIO-GPU / virgl in a VM.

Download and install from an Ubuntu terminal:

curl -fLO https://github.com/starling-build/starling/releases/download/v0.5.0/starling_0.5.0_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./starling_0.5.0_amd64.deb

On Ubuntu Desktop, log out, select Starling from the login screen's session menu, and sign in. On Server or a minimal local install, first add a login manager with sudo apt install gdm3.

On WSL2, no login manager is needed. After installing inside Ubuntu 26.04, start the desktop:

starling-session

Then connect from Windows PowerShell or the Run dialog:

mstsc /v:localhost:3390

See the installation guide for requirements, WSL setup, upgrades and troubleshooting.

Release branches and validation

Use release-0.5.0 in both the desktop and engine repositories for the matching sources. The package version is 0.5.0.

Gate results and the tested package checksum are recorded in GATES.md.

Validation completed on the attached package:

• SDK: 4,307 XCTest tests and 822 Swift Testing tests passed.
• Accelerated VM: 34 passed, six skipped.
• Software-rendered VM: 28 passed, 12 skipped; UI shutdown passed.
• WSL: all 15 checks passed, including idle CPU and city animation after reconnect.
• Build, packaging, independent-display regressions and website checks passed.

The gate report lists the skipped checks and their environment limitations. Software rendering has a noticeably slower cold city start: the first frame took 15.3 seconds in the test VM. Hardware acceleration is preferable for exploring the city.

SHA256SUMS verifies the attached Ubuntu package.

Release source: 97f3c72. The attached package remains the gate-tested runtime build; subsequent commits update tests, documentation, and the website.

Starling Terminal 0.2.0 — remote workspaces, and sessions that outlive the connection

The terminal grows a workspace: split it into panes, stack tabs, and reach any host from one switcher. The sessions live in termd, so they survive a dropped connection and you reattach where you left off — the shell keeps running while you were gone.

What's new

• Splits and panes. Divide a workspace into panes that float with a visible gap, see at a glance which pane is working and which finished while you were looking elsewhere, and move between them from the keyboard.
• Tabs. Stack workspaces as tabs, each on its own surface so a tab looks and behaves like a tab, and reach any of them without the mouse.
• One switcher for every host. Type an ssh command straight into the switcher to open a remote workspace, and let a host say how it is reached. A launch is a local shell where you are, not wherever you were last, and the switcher remembers where each client was.
• Sessions that belong to nothing. termd gives a session a real lifecycle: it can end and say so, it asks the kernel where a session is when the shell will not, and two clients can share one workspace with a clear rule for who drives. A dropped connection no longer ends the session — you reattach and it is still there, still running.
• A find bar that pastes. Paste into the find bar (and the switcher) and it gives back the match.
• Font zoom. ⌘+ and ⌘− change the type size, and it is remembered.
• Auto-answered prompts. Answer a recurring prompt from a pattern, once per question, with a ten-second grace so a human can step in first.
• A darker ground with the purple cast removed.
• vim's search is no longer underlined. A keyboard-protocol control was being read as a text attribute; it is a control again.

Install

macOS arm64 — macOS 14 or newer:

curl -LO https://github.com/starling-build/starling/releases/download/terminal-v0.2.0/starling-terminal-0.2.0-macos-arm64.zip
ditto -xk starling-terminal-0.2.0-macos-arm64.zip /Applications

Unpack with ditto -xk, not unzip: the bundle is ad-hoc signed, and plain unzip materialises AppleDouble sidecar files inside it that break the signature. The bundle is not notarized, so macOS holds it on first launch — right-click → Open, or clear the quarantine attribute.

Linux x86_64 — a .deb for Ubuntu/Debian.

Windows x86_64 — a portable .zip; unzip and run.

The remote server, starling-termd. Remote workspaces reach a host by running the session daemon there. It is one statically-linked Linux x86_64 binary with no dependencies — scp starling-termd-0.2.0-linux-x86_64 to the server, mark it executable, and the switcher's ssh connects to it. Nothing to install and no toolchain needed on the far end.

Built from branch release-terminal-0.2.0, engine pinned by the same branch name in starling-engine; the commit and engine are recorded in the archive.

sha256:

• starling-terminal-0.2.0-macos-arm64.zip b9187d7e5beb762e5cefaa9fbf4e5f6e5c96c4bf38a677b188003327c33ac771
• starling-terminal_0.2.0_amd64.deb 8bd89b6ceabab6104191a12c21574952b5f5aa3000b7088146a51a26007b3fc1
• starling-terminal-0.2.0-windows-x86_64.zip 5f2eebbc1c2d098d1920f892fd875a9646783c6212f99aa53a2cbe94f3492dda
• starling-termd-0.2.0-linux-x86_64 f4bf3ce21ee70cbbb1d11980b2dc1bde525868fc8d47841313500a80e5ac52ed

The Windows shell, replaced per user — dock, Start menu, desktop, file manager and notification tray, with Explorer kept alive underneath for packaged apps and file dialogs. No admin rights, no system files touched: one registry value in your own account, and Explorer comes back the moment you ask. 0.2.0 runs on Windows 10 as well as Windows 11.

What changed since 0.1.0.

• Windows 10 (22H2) is supported with the same binary and the same look. The dock's icons start in the corner there, as Windows 10's own do.
• The first outside reports, all closed (#26–#29): the taskbar alignment follows Windows' own setting (change it in Settings and the dock follows); right-clicking the bar itself opens its menu, with Task Manager and Taskbar settings on it; an app launched from the dock comes up in front; a new dock starts from the taskbar pins you already had.
• Minimized windows are parked off screen by the setting that actually decides it, on both Windows, instead of relying on Explorer having done it.
• A profile that never set a wallpaper gets the theme's, instead of black, and the desktop now fills the screen when the display's resolution changes.
• The Start menu's File Explorer opens Starling's own file manager — the same one the dock's Files tile and Win+E open, not Windows' Explorer.
• The desktop stays painted when an Explorer starts beside the shell — including after an Explorer crash.
• Windows 10's Explorer no longer crashes at logon. It was ours: a message telling its taskbar to auto-hide reached it before the taskbar was built. It now waits.

On Windows 10. The dock, the Start menu, and the shell's own file explorer, on a Windows 10 22H2 VM running this build.

Measured on the same PC, filmed side by side (medians of 20, 0.1.0 numbers; nothing on this path changed):

Install. StarlingSetup-0.2.0.exe — double-click, confirm, sign out and back in. It installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Starling and registers per user; other accounts keep Explorer, and nothing needs administrator rights. The zip is the same payload with the options: Install.ps1 takes -Now (switch this session), -NoRegister, and -Destination.

Leave. Uninstall.ps1 un-registers, restores Explorer's taskbar, and removes the files (-KeepFiles to keep them). If a Starling process is ever killed rather than closed, WinShellBar.exe --restore-taskbar puts Explorer's taskbar and tray back — and if the shell crash-loops it un-registers itself and hands the session back to Explorer on its own. The full install/uninstall/recovery story: docs/WINDOWS-INSTALL.md.

Unsigned, for now. SmartScreen will warn on first run (More info → Run anyway); a machine with Smart App Control enforcing will refuse it. Signing is planned (docs/WINDOWS-SIGNING.md) and 0.2.0 ships before it.

The exact binary in these downloads passed the shell's 28-check gate three times: installed from this very setup exe on a clean Windows 11 VM with no toolchain on it, on a Windows 10 22H2 VM, and on the physical Windows 11 machine. The checks cover the session processes, the work-area reservation, minimize and restore, the file explorer (its context menu, and copy/move/ re

Starling 0.4.0 — runs on Windows through WSL, picks how it looks, and costs nothing idle

Two and a half weeks and 649 commits since 0.3.0. Three things changed that you will notice: the desktop runs on a Windows machine through WSL, it has more than one look, and it costs almost nothing when you leave it alone.

It runs on Windows, through WSL

You do not need a Linux machine to run Starling any more. Install WSL on Windows, install the .deb inside it, and connect with any RDP client — Windows' own Remote Desktop will do. The whole desktop comes up: the shell, the dock or taskbar, the apps, the file manager, the terminal.

This works because WSL has no graphics device at all — not an empty one, an absent one — so the desktop takes a different path entirely. The remote screen becomes the display. There is no local window being mirrored to you; the RDP surface is where the desktop is drawn in the first place, in software, and what you connect to is the real thing rather than a copy of it.

It is a supported platform now, not an experiment. It has its own gate that runs on every release, on real WSL on a real Windows machine — eleven checks covering that the package installs on a clean Ubuntu, that the shell starts with no GPU, that a real client connects and is activated, that the pixels it receives are an actual desktop rather than a black rectangle, and that the session leaves the shell alive and back at idle afterwards.

Three things that are true of it and were not before:

• It honours the style you picked. It used to come up macOS whatever you had chosen, because the code that restores your choice only ran on the graphics path. Both styles work over RDP now.
• Idling costs nothing. With the listener up and nobody connected, the desktop uses 0.00% of a core. The listener used to wake five times a second just to notice if it had been asked to stop.
• It behaves the same as the local desktop, because it is the same desktop — same shell, same apps, same package.

The same path serves any headless Linux box: a machine in a cupboard with no monitor runs the full desktop and you connect to it.

The desktop has styles

Settings → Appearance → Desktop Style. Two of them today: the macOS one you already had, and a Windows 11 one. The whole desktop rebuilds into your choice and remembers it across a relogin.

This is a change of shape, not a repaint. In the Windows style there is no menu bar along the top; the taskbar runs the full width of the screen edge and reserves its space, so a maximised window stops above it rather than sliding under. Start is a panel that opens above the bar instead of a full-screen grid. Window buttons move to the right and become the caption trio, with the close button turning Microsoft's red when you point at it. Hovering a taskbar tile shows a live preview of that window — the real thing, updating, not a thumbnail taken when it opened.

The colours are not eyeballed. They come from WinUI's own resource dictionary, by name, the same values our Windows shell uses. The chrome takes a tint from your wallpaper the way Mica does. Text is Selawik, Segoe UI's metric-compatible stand-in, which we can actually ship.

The first-party apps follow the style too — Files, Settings, the terminal, the rest. They were ten separate hand-written palettes of the same shape; now they share one, and it points at whichever style is active.

Adding a third style is one file and one line. There is deliberately no if style == … anywhere else in the shell.

It stops working when you stop working

An idle Starling desktop used to spend 1.40% of a CPU core doing nothing in particular. It now spends 0.02% — seventy times less. On a laptop that is the difference between the desktop being a background cost and not being one.

Everything that used to run on a timer now waits to be told:

• The frame pump asked recording, screen sharing and RDP thirty times