One process draws the chrome
The panels along the bottom, the ribbon across the top and the volume dodge are three surfaces of a single program. They used to be separate services, each paying for its own runtime and its own connection to the compositor, which bought nothing and cost twice.
The theme is sovereign
Corners, spacing, density, transparency and the accent are a user choice, and no application can override them. An app does not write a colour — it asks for a role and gets whatever that role means on this machine right now. Change the accent and every window follows, including ones already open.
Written in Rust, drawn with Carbon
The session runs on labwc, a compositor built from pristine upstream with a small patch set. Everything above it — the shell surfaces, files, settings, the installer, the software catalogue — is Rust, built on Carbon, our own UI framework. An app's code says what is on screen; how it looks comes from a CSS theme, so a change to the theme changes every window at once.
- No X11 session; Wayland is the only path.
- No colours in application code — the theme draws everything.
- One accent, used where it means something, never as decoration.