Macora — a Wayland DE I've been building solo in Rust, daily-driving for a month

This is Macora, a custom Wayland desktop environment for Linux, written solo in Rust on top of Smithay.

It's WIP and rough in places. Some parts are polished, some are ugly, and some are held together by caffeine and questionable engineering decisions. That said, I've been daily-driving it for about a month.

The goal isn't to clone macOS 1:1. It's a cohesive, Wayland-first Linux DE with macOS-grade polish.

Some unusual parts

• Per-task scheduler daemon
• Classifies processes by cgroup scope and adjusts nice / SCHED_IDLE / ioprio / CPU affinity per task. The focused window stays at 60 FPS while a 32-job cargo build saturates every core.
• The compositor is the greeter
• No tuigreet / gtkgreet. The login screen is rendered by macora --greeter-mode, using the same shaders and spring animations as the session. Display-manager switching is atomic, with rollback-on-failure.
• Real live-blur backdrops
• Dual-Kawase ping-pong blur from the pre-shell framebuffer, not a fake gradient.
• XWayland good enough for Wine / Proton / native X11 games
• Proper focus routing, pointer constraints, and relative-pointer support.
• Tabbed windows
• Multiple windows of the same app can be grouped into one tabbed container. This is especially useful for VS Code and terminals.
• Own xdg-desktop-portal
• Screencast via dmabuf + SHM, Settings, Secret. OBS, Discord screenshare, and Flatpaks work natively.
• Spring-physics animator
• Actual springs, not CSS-style easing curves.
• Shared backend state
• Settings app and compositor popovers use the same backend state, so Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / audio / brightness don't disagree depending on where you look.

What ships with it

All built for this project, using one design language:

• Dock
• Launcher
• Window switcher
• Mission Control-style overview
• Settings
• Files
• Calendar with Google sync
• Weather
• App Center with PackageKit + Flatpak
• Notification Center
• Control Center
• Screenshot tool + editor
• Screen Recorder
• SNI tray
• MPRIS now-playing
• Night Shift
• Hot corners

Stack

• Rust
• Smithay 0.7
• GlesRenderer
• calloop
• zbus 5
• fontdue
• iced 0.14 for standalone apps

No Tokio in the compositor.

Rough edges

• Fedora-only for now
• Desktop-focused, power management deferred
• English-only UI
• Still plenty of unfinished polish
• Designed for modern desktop-class hardware

Macora is not trying to be an ultra-lightweight DE for ancient laptops. Smoothness, live blur, animations, and compositor responsiveness are part of the design goal, so the baseline is a reasonably modern CPU/GPU. It might work on older machines, but I'm not testing for that right now.

What I'm trying to figure out

I know the Wayland desktop space isn't empty. GNOME, KDE, Hyprland, Sway, COSMIC, and others already exist.

I'm not pretending the world needs another DE from one sleep-deprived person. But I do think there may be room for a Wayland-first desktop that feels like one complete system instead of a pile of extensions and config files.

So:

• Would you actually try it?
• What would make you switch from your current setup?
• What's an instant dealbreaker?
• Do you prefer a full DE/session, or individual components?
• Is "macOS-inspired, but independent Linux DE" a useful framing, or just cursed?

Brutal feedback welcome. I'd rather know now if this is useful, or if I'm just building a very pretty hole to throw my free time into.