Using Starling

• Click your name at the login screen.
• Open the session menu — usually a gear, or a small icon in a lower corner of the password box.
• Choose Starling from the list, then enter your password and sign in.

Starling stays selected for next time. The session menu only appears with a Wayland-capable login manager (GDM has one); it looks a little different on LightDM or SDDM, but the step is the same — find the session picker and choose Starling. Once you've signed in, you land on the desktop, whose interaction model is close to macOS.

• Click an icon to launch or focus that app.
• A running app shows an indicator dot under its icon.
• Drag an icon to reorder the dock.
• Right-click an icon for its menu, including Remove from Dock.

Installed apps that aren't pinned appear in the dock while they run, and drop off when they close.

• Click any app to launch it.
• Type to filter the grid by name — start typing and only matching apps remain.
• Click empty space or press Esc to dismiss it.

• Wi-Fi — join a network without opening Settings.
• Dark Mode — switches the whole desktop and every first-party app.
• Tiling — retiles the current space; toggle it off to restore floating windows.
• Muted — mute or unmute output, with volume and brightness sliders below the tiles.
• Record and Record App — see recording.

The bell collects notifications instead of interrupting you with banners: nothing steals focus, and you read what happened when you choose to.

• Record — from the control centre, or Ctrl + Shift + R, captures the whole screen.
• Record App — opens Mission Control and asks which window you want. It captures that window’s own content, not the patch of screen it sits in, so windows stacked on top never appear and moving or resizing it mid-recording doesn’t spoil the take.
• A red dot and a running clock sit in the menu bar for the whole recording, so one can never be going unnoticed.

Recordings land in ~/Videos as MP4, and the Video Player opens them. Where the machine has a hardware H.264 encoder the composited frame goes straight to it as a dma-buf and the CPU never touches a pixel — about 0.05 of a core on a modern laptop. Machines without one fall back to a software encoder, which works but costs more.

• Windows carry macOS-style colored circle buttons on the left of the title bar — close, minimize, maximize.
• Drag the title bar to move a window; drag an edge or corner to resize.
• Double-click the title bar to toggle maximized.
• Windows float by default. Flip the whole desktop to a tiling (dwm-style master-and-stack) layout with the Tiling tile in the control centre or the Tiling Windows switch in Settings — toggling back restores your floating layout.

To add a space, right-click the wallpaper and choose New Desktop, or click the + tile in Mission Control. Ctrl + arrows belong to the system — apps never see them — so they work no matter which window is focused.

• + New creates a workspace and opens its name for editing in place — Enter saves, Esc keeps the old name. Rename later from the pencil on the row you're pointing at.
• An empty workspace shows Choose an app to work in — pick the driver. Drag the divider to change the split.
• Right-click a tab to Move to Desktop or Close it.
• The trash on a hovered row opens the row's menu: Remove moves the windows to your desktop, Delete stops every app in the room. Both sit behind the menu so a stray click can't stop your agent's apps.
• Each monitor has its own workspace mode — the toggle acts on the monitor the pointer is on.

Scaling is pinned to 2.0 in this release, and there is no display-mode picker — the session uses the connector's preferred mode.

The catalog is small and curated on purpose, and most tiles use generic category glyphs rather than vendor logos — those logos are trademarks and Starling ships none of them. Chrome and VS Code show their real icons in the Launchpad and dock, read from your system at runtime.

• No screen lock. There is a screensaver, but it is decoration: any key or click dismisses it, with nothing asked. Don't rely on it to secure an unattended machine.
• Every display scales the same. The session picks one scale for the whole desktop (fractional steps included — 1.25 and 1.5 render as crisply as 2.0); per-display scale isn't implemented yet.
• No display-mode picker. The session uses the connector's preferred mode.
• Zoom runs without audio. It reports no pactl and pacmd found — expected, and deliberate: installing pulseaudio-utils makes Zoom crash at startup. Sound in other apps is unaffected.
• Verified on AMD and virtio-gpu graphics, and on NVIDIA as a hybrid laptop's second GPU (per-app render offload); Intel, and NVIDIA driving the desktop itself, aren't yet tested.

Hit a problem? The session log is at /tmp/starling-session-<your-uid>.log, and issues go to the tracker. The full user guide and install guide live in the repo.