Over the last few years I tried to switch from Windows to Linux more times than I can count. And every time, I liked almost everything about it.
Linux is fantastic. I love the power of the terminal, Btrfs and its snapshots, living on the leading edge of software. None of that was ever the problem.
The problem was what I saw on the screen.
Out of the box, Windows feels current. The Linux desktop still feels like 2013. Not in what it can do, but in how it looks, moves and responds: the animations, the icons, the small details that tell you whether something was designed this decade.
It’s an aesthetic thing, I know. But aesthetics are not a small thing when you look at something all day. And I had just bought a high-end desktop machine. I wanted to actually use it, not feel like I was back in 2013 because of the animations and icons in front of me.
“Just customize it”
Yes, I know. I can customize. That’s the first answer anyone gives, and with enough themes, extensions and evenings, you can get close.
But I don’t want to.
Wanting a modern desktop shouldn’t be a strange desire you satisfy with a weekend of tweaking. It should be the default. The baseline. It’s what you get on Windows or macOS the first time you turn the computer on.
I want what Windows and macOS get right, and on this, the Linux desktop still has something to learn from them.
So I started building Vela.
Modern is not a theme
You can’t get there by painting new icons on an old foundation. Much of what makes a desktop feel right happens underneath: when a frame is drawn, how sharp a window is at 125%, whether an animation keeps up with your monitor.
So Vela owns the whole pipeline. It has its own Wayland compositor and Vulkan renderer, a Qt Quick shell, and a file manager and settings app built to match. In practice:
- Fluid. Every animation advances on your monitor’s real refreshes, never on an arbitrary timer: at 180 Hz, it can take 180 steps per second. A slow app can’t hold the screen back; the cursor, the animations and every other window stay on time.
- Sharp. Fractional scaling is designed around physical pixels. When an app renders at the screen’s scale, its pixels reach the display one to one, even at 125% or 175%, and an automated test checks it bit for bit.
- Coherent. Taskbar, Start menu, Snap layouts, Task View, quick settings, notifications, Files and Settings are designed as one desktop, not a collection of unrelated utilities. More are on the way.
None of this costs efficiency. On my main development machine, the compositor idles at 17 MiB and 0.1% CPU. Use the hardware when it improves the experience; avoid overhead when it doesn’t. That’s the whole idea.
Where it is today
Vela is alpha software. You can already pick it at the login screen, next to Plasma, and use it every day: compositor, shell, file manager, settings, lock screen. There is still a lot to do, from input methods to HDR to Vela’s own login screen, and this journal is where I’ll write about it as it happens.
If you’ve ever felt the same way, try Vela, follow along, or tell me what’s missing. A modern desktop should be the normal thing to expect.