Gloam
NixOS · Wayland · 3D

Gloam

The desktop at dusk.

A NixOS-based distribution where your windows float above a living sunset sea, built around Shady, a 3D Wayland compositor.

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x86_64 · live ISO on NixOS 26.05 · free and open source

One sky, start to finish

From the login card to the desktop, the light never breaks.

Gloam greets you with Shady itself. Type your password, the greeter steps aside, and your session opens under the same sky you logged in to.

The Gloam login screen: a clock and a frosted login card over a purple sunset sea
Log in The greeter, with the last user and session remembered.
The Gloam desktop: translucent windows floating above the Afterglow sunset sea
Work Glass windows above the water, the bar in the colours of the hour.
What you get

A calm desktop with a few tricks up its sleeve.

  • Windows in a 3D world

    Shady places ordinary Wayland apps in a shared perspective space. Fold them into paper, throw them across the sea, or step back into a 3D overview with Super+O.

  • A sky that keeps time

    Afterglow moves through golden hour, afterglow, blue hour and night (Super+T). The bar, window borders and every accent cross-fade with the light.

  • A login screen that belongs

    The greeter is Shady too: a frosted card over the same living sea. It remembers who logged in last and which session they chose.

  • Reproducible, and reversible

    Gloam is NixOS underneath. The whole system comes from one configuration, and any upgrade can be rolled back from the boot menu.

  • Safe Mode, one keypress away

    Pick Shady (Safe Mode) in the greeter for the same desktop on wlroots’ conventional renderer, and Ctrl+Alt+F2 always reaches a console.

  • Scriptable to the core

    Configure and script the compositor in Lua, drive it over a JSON IPC socket with shadyctl, or extend it with native C plugins that hot-reload.

Afterglow

Four hours of light, rendered live.

The sky and sea are drawn by a native Shady plugin from the camera you are looking through, not a wallpaper. Press Super+T to move to the next hour.

  1. The Afterglow desktop at golden hour
    Golden hourThe sun sits just above the water.
  2. The Afterglow desktop at afterglow
    AfterglowRose light after the sun is gone.
  3. The Afterglow desktop at blue hour
    Blue hourCool and quiet, the first stars.
  4. The Afterglow desktop at night
    NightA dark sea under a full sky.
Already on NixOS?

Bring the sky to your own system.

Everything Gloam ships is a NixOS module. Add the flake, enable the session and the greeter, and rebuild.

Full instructions →

# flake.nix
inputs.shady.url = "github:gloaming-dusk/shady";

# in your NixOS configuration
imports = [ inputs.shady.nixosModules.default ];

programs.shady.enable = true;
programs.shady.greeter.enable = true;
Shady's Neon Transit rice: windows over a glowing neon grid
Built on Shady

Gloam is the distribution. Shady is the compositor.

Shady is an experimental 3D Wayland compositor on wlroots, with Lua scripting, a desktop shell, an IPC socket and a C plugin API. Gloam packages it into a system you can boot. Rices like Neon Transit show how differently the same compositor can look.

Explore Shady Read the docs

Try it tonight.

Write the live ISO to a USB stick or boot it in a VM. Nothing is installed until you decide to.

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