Aurelia

Aurelia is an original, Linux-native Wayland compositor written in Rust. The project aims for a polished floating desktop with disciplined motion and glass-like materials while prioritizing protocol correctness, security, accessibility, and maintainability.

The current milestone is intentionally small: a nested Smithay compositor that opens a Winit window, accepts Wayland clients, renders shared-memory XDG toplevels, and sends frame callbacks. Effects, a native DRM backend, the shell, and window-management policy are later milestones.

Build prerequisites

On Arch Linux/WSL, install the Wayland, EGL/GLES, XKB, and X11 development packages required by Smithay's Winit backend. Then run:

cargo build --workspace

Run

RUST_LOG=aurelia=debug cargo run -p aurelia-compositor -- \
  --background '#111827'

The compositor prints its nested Wayland socket in machine-readable form:

WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1

Point a client at that socket without replacing the host session's XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:

WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 alacritty

Close the nested window or send SIGINT/SIGTERM for a clean shutdown.

Verification

cargo fmt --all --check
cargo check --workspace --all-targets
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace

See docs/architecture/ and docs/adr/ for the decisions that constrain the implementation.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT license at your option.