// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
And Folks, We Have a Vibe Coded Linux Distro!
Starling is a new open source Linux desktop environment. One developer built it by directing Claude for about six months, ending up with a working desktop that boots into its own session with a compositor and window manager.
Don't think of this as a themed shell bolted onto GNOME or KDE either. It brings its own X11 server, so apps like Chrome, Slack, and Zoom run on it without requiring any special modifications.
Every part of it, like the shell, the compositor, the window manager, and the apps, are written in Swift, a language that has hardly been used for a Linux desktop before.
Most of the heavylifting here has been done using Claude, which was instructed to follow things like "Wayland only. Do not read, modify, or reference X11Server/ or X11 launch paths unless explicitly asked."
Under the hood, the framework running the whole desktop is a full port of Flutter's Dart framework to Swift. Starling brings a Wayland compositor written in C and its own X11 server, so older X11 apps still work.
That combination is what actually makes it a desktop rather than a demo.
I tested Starling on an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS virtual machine, and its rough edges showed up almost immediately. Right after logging in, the resolution defaulted to a non-standard, letterboxed widescreen ratio of 5120x2160 at 2x scaling (according to Fastfetch).
I tried searching for an option to change this in the Settings menu, and the "Displays" page only had a slider for scaling, nothing for resolution itself. Things might be better if you install it on a computer directly, but that's a risk you are more than welcome to take. 🙂↔️
A few smaller things didn't work either. The search bar inside the Launchpad (app launcher) doesn't respond to typing, and none of the accent color swatches in Appearance actually apply once clicked.
The App Store itself works, technically. I installed Chrome through it without any errors, but the browser opened up oversized and ran noticeably laggy once it loaded. Not exactly the experience you'd want from one of the few apps the store puts at the top of its list.