The Orbital desktop environment provides a display server, window manager and compositor.
This display server is more simple than X11 and Wayland making the porting task more quick and easy, it's not advanced like X11 and Wayland yet but enough to port most Linux/BSD programs.
Compared to Wayland, Orbital has one server implementation, while Wayland provide protocols for compositors.
- Custom Resolutions
- App Launcher (bottom bar)
- File Manager
- Text Editor
- Calculator
- Terminal Emulator
If you hold the Super key (generally the key with a Windows logo) it will show all keyboard shortcuts in a pop-up.
The programs written with these libraries can run on Orbital.
- SDL1.2
- SDL2
- winit
- softbuffer
- Slint (through winit and softbuffer)
- Iced (through winit and softbuffer)
- egui (can use winit or SDL2)
Apps (or 'clients') create a window and draw to it by using the orbclient client.
If you wish to see examples of client apps that use orbclient to "talk" to Orbital and create windows and draw to them, then you can find some in orbclient/examples folder.
If you want to port a program to Orbital, see below:
-
If the program is written in Rust probably it works on Orbital because the
winitcrate is used in most places, but there are programs that access X11 or Wayland directly. You need to port these programs towinitand merge on upstream. -
If the program is written in C or C++ and access X11 or Wayland directly, it must be ported to the Orbital library.
To learn how to contribute to this system component you need to read the following document:
To learn how to do development with this system component inside the Redox build system you need to read the Build System and Coding and Building pages.
To build this system component you need to download the Redox build system, you can learn how to do it on the Building Redox page.
This is necessary because they only work with cross-compilation to a Redox virtual machine, but you can do some testing from Linux.