Why this exists
Desktops have grown a bar at the top, a dock at the bottom, a tray in one corner and a search box that wants the keyboard. Roundel OS puts all of it in one circle that is not there until you ask for it, and can be worked with one hand on a mouse or a trackball.
It started as a desktop for one laptop and grew into something worth giving away. It is early, it changes often, and it is not finished.
In short
One program, not a pile of them
The ring, the panel, Settings, the Store, the login screen, the lock screen and the Roundel Installer are all the same Rust binary. Each roundel- command is a symbolic link to it, and the program picks its tool by the name it was started as. roundel --names lists them.
That is not a clever trick for its own sake. It means one set of colours, one way of asking for a password, one stylesheet, one place a bug gets fixed, and one thing to keep up to date. A new Settings page is one file in a folder plus one line in that folder's list.
Only roundel-admin runs as root, through pkexec. It checks every argument it is given and reads passwords from standard input only, so the rest of the desktop never needs to be trusted with them.
What it is built on
Debian stable underneath, with apt and Flatpak behaving exactly as they do anywhere else. labwc for the compositor, GTK 4 for the windows, PipeWire for sound, NetworkManager, BlueZ, CUPS, snapper. All of it ordinary and replaceable.
What it deliberately is not
There is no X11 session, no Qt, no GNOME session. Xwayland is installed because labwc and the greeter need it, and starts only when an X11-only app opens a window. Nothing is installed with recommended extras, and every package is listed in the README.
Ordinary underneath
Nothing in Roundel OS is a private invention where a standard part would do. The disks are laid out the way Debian lays them out, the snapshots are snapper's, the sound is PipeWire, the apps are Flatpaks from Flathub, and your settings are plain files in your home folder.
That matters when something goes wrong. Every tool you would reach for on any other Linux computer works here, and anything you learn here is worth knowing somewhere else.
Things worth saying plainly
The parts that a features list would leave out.
Built with AI assistance.
It is early
Roundel OS is tested on Debian stable, which is 13 at the time of writing, and on a small number of machines. It has not been tested on Debian testing or unstable, and nothing can be promised about how it behaves there.
Things move between versions, and a rolling release means the desktop you install today is not quite the one you installed last month. There is no support desk: there is a repository and an issue tracker.
No warranty, and no tracking
Roundel OS is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind, and you use it entirely at your own risk. Sections 15 and 16 of the licence say so in the usual words, and the installer shows them before it changes anything.
Nothing in it phones home. This site sets no cookies and counts no visitors.
Thanks
Roundel OS is a thin layer on other people's work. Settings, Thanks lists every project it is built on, with a link to each one's home and a heart beside those that accept donations. A few of them:
- labwc, the compositor
- GTK, the windows and widgets
- Debian, everything underneath
- Flathub, most of the apps
- PipeWire, the sound
- snapper, the snapshots
- Numix Circle, the icons
- whisper.cpp, the voice control
Free software, and meant to stay that way
Roundel OS is under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. You may use it, read it, change it and pass it on, and anything you pass on carries the same freedom with it.
The whole source is at github.com/lightmorphic/roundel, including this website and the script that builds the installation image. Bug reports and patches are welcome; so is someone telling us a screen is confusing, which is harder to find out than a crash.
Made by Lightmorphic
A small software business. Lightmorphic Flat, which carries app settings between Linux computers, writes the same kind of backup file Roundel OS does.
