Gravitas development preview for Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 amd64

Install from https://muzz.in/gravitas/#install. Download install.sh, then run:
  bash install.sh
To keep your existing login manager and boot theme:
  bash install.sh --desktop-only
For Command alone:
  bash install.sh --app command
For Reap alone:
  bash install.sh --app reap
For Type alone:
  bash install.sh --app type
For Drill alone:
  bash install.sh --app drill
For any native suite app:
  bash install.sh --app image
Available app names: command, reap, type, capture, drill, image, documents,
calculator, clocks, listen, video, storage, backups, software.
All apps run on other Wayland desktops without the Gravitas compositor.
Documents uses system Poppler; Video requires system FFmpeg. Listen plays AAC
when optional FFmpeg is installed. Software uses PackageKit authorization.
Full desktop removal retains these apps. Remove an app separately with:
  bash install.sh --app image --uninstall
To inspect compatibility without changing anything:
  bash install.sh --check

Type edits plain text and Markdown source. It includes encoding conversion and
crash recovery; RTF formatting, spell checking and printing are not in this preview.
Standalone Type includes the shared appearance presets and GTK file chooser portal
and runs on other Wayland desktops without the Gravitas compositor.

The installer downloads versioned Debian packages over HTTPS, checks their
SHA-256 hashes, and installs their dependencies from your configured Ubuntu
apt sources. You may inspect the script before running it. It requires sudo
for apt, but never switches your session or restarts the display manager.

The full install selects the Gravitas SDDM login theme and Plymouth/GRUB boot
themes by default. It requires GRUB and an existing initramfs. Previous settings
are backed up under /var/lib/gravitas/appearance; no service is restarted.
Save your work and reboot, then select Gravitas in the login-screen session
menu. With --desktop-only, logging out and choosing Gravitas is sufficient. Ubuntu stays available in that menu. This is a development
preview, not the complete Gravitas OS or a replacement for your Ubuntu system.
Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 amd64 with an existing desktop/display manager are supported.
Custom display-manager SessionDir overrides must include
/usr/share/wayland-sessions for the Gravitas entry to appear.

The default graphical boot theme uses Coswall's original rendered sky with
warp-speed stars from its celestial catalogue and a new stellar-orbit symbol.
Cached star sprites keep motion running without decoding full frames during flight. The animation never delays boot: disk-password prompts,
questions, updates and the login handoff take priority. It runs in Plymouth
before the compositor loads, without requiring a GPU shader or video player.

Optional Zenbook Duo boot animation: with the two built-in panels exposed, the
logo forms on the lower panel, stretches upward through a teal hinge portal,
and lands on the upper panel with a ripple. After the full install, enable it:
  sudo gravitas-appearance duo --top-head 0
If it travels the wrong way on the next boot, use --top-head 1 instead.
You can also add --duo-top-head 0 (or 1) to the full installer command.
To return to the ordinary splash:
  sudo gravitas-appearance duo --disable
The setting survives upgrades. These commands rebuild the initramfs for the
next boot without restarting your session. Plymouth exposes display indexes,
not eDP connector names, so the screen order needs calibration and can change
after hardware/driver changes. The ordinary splash remains the default and is
used with one or more than two displays, after hotplug, and for password prompts.
It cannot make firmware expose an unavailable lower panel during boot.

The login theme uses Coswall and the native lock's clock, password layout and
impact waves, preloaded before typing begins. Only the primary display has login
controls. Hardware mode changes during the SDDM/compositor handoff can still blank
a monitor briefly; this is not yet a single compositor-owned greeter.

Gravitas Settings opens from the taskbar or launcher. Native pages cover touchpad,
mouse, keyboard, appearance, motion, lock/privacy and displays. Input controls
follow hardware capabilities; keyboard layouts and options accept XKB codes.
Apply saves changes without overwriting unrelated TOML settings. Motion settings
include Cinematic/Standard and full/reduced/off. Sound and network currently open
the installed system tools; full KDE feature parity is still in progress.

Display Settings in the app launcher or taskbar lists connected monitors and offers
resolution/refresh rate, per-monitor scale, monitor arrangement, and VRR on supported
hardware. Native display changes have a Keep/Revert confirmation and automatically
revert after 15 seconds if the settings window closes or you cannot see the new mode.
The desktop-wide scale is also available; gravitas-display --scale 150 sets 150%.
Settings persist in compositor.toml, preserving other settings and comments.
The top-level scale multiplies per-output scales. Native apps, window chrome,
panels, and the lock screen follow the output scale. The separate pre-login greeter
uses automatic HiDPI scaling. Nested sessions cannot change the host monitor mode.

Super or Super+Space opens the native Gravitas app launcher, also available from
its taskbar button. The launcher searches installed apps and opens their desktop
entries. Entries marked Terminal=true open in x-terminal-emulator; an existing
Ubuntu terminal satisfies this dependency, or the installer adds xterm.

The native taskbar groups an application's windows into one button, with
Command and Reap pinned initially. Click one window to focus/minimize/restore;
click a group to select a titled window. Right-click or Shift+F10 offers window
actions, pinning and pin order; middle-click closes the selected window. All open
windows keeps crowded layouts reachable. The right-hand clock opens a month calendar.
Taskbar settings choose the top-left screen, every screen or a named connector
(eDP-2 is the Duo's lower screen), plus all-screen or current-screen window lists.
A disconnected preferred screen temporarily uses the top-left screen and returns
on reconnect. Preferences are saved in ~/.config/gravitas/taskbar.toml; shared
motion settings stay in panel.toml. Auto-hide and height (44 or 88 logical pixels)
are available in Taskbar settings. Auto-hide keeps a 2 px activation strip and never
resizes tiled windows on hover. Drag pinned buttons to reorder them. Hover cards
and grouped pickers show live thumbnails; hidden previews stop capturing, and lock
revokes their images.
Exact stock Waybar and previous managed-service startup migrate to [security] panel,
with a .pre-panel backup; personal panel commands and explicit security.panel settings
are preserved. The compositor supervises the panel with a 1–60 second restart backoff
and a dedicated capture connection that ordinary apps cannot use. The old panel
service is removed. Log back in after updating to use the supervised connection.

System controls include Home, Reap, settings, lock, volume and media transport.
Compact layouts keep these behind a click-open menu. StatusNotifier tray items
open their real application menus. Audio settings open the mixer; volume controls
are capped at 100%. Network settings open Gravitas native NetworkManager controls. The power button opens the
native Gravitas menu: Lock, Suspend, Log out, Restart and Shut down. Log out,
Restart and Shut down require confirmation; Escape cancels.

The notification button shows notification history on click and toggles
Do Not Disturb on right-click. Gravitas runs its native notification daemon as a
supervised service. Its private history and quiet mode survive restarts. Popups and
history are protected by the compositor's live lock state. Custom notification startup
commands are preserved; only the exact former default migrates, with a backup.

Settings includes Docks & tray, Start customization and a graphical skin editor with
live previews. Skins can change colors, fonts, spacing, materials and springs. The
built-in default is copied to a new name when edited; optional suggested dock layouts
are applied separately so changing a skin does not rearrange the desktop.

Super: app launcher. Super+Enter: Command. Super+grave: drop-down terminal.
Super+Q: close window. Super+M: maximize. Super+F: full screen.
Alt+Tab: next window. Super+L: lock. Super+Shift+E: log out.
At your first Gravitas login a default compositor.toml is created in
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gravitas (normally ~/.config/gravitas). Existing settings
are preserved. Only exact, untouched installer defaults from older previews are
upgraded to Coswall, with a .pre-coswall backup. Customized configurations and an
explicit background effect = "none" stay unchanged. The background migration
runs once; keeping its backup also preserves a return to the old default.
The exact untouched previous desktop default also adopts compact Unified chrome,
with its original saved as .pre-compact-chrome. Personal edits and alternate style
choices are kept. Keeping that backup preserves a return to the previous default.
On login, stock Super and Super+Space
bindings whose only command is fuzzel are upgraded to gravitas-launcher, with a
.pre-launcher backup. Custom launcher commands and all other settings are kept.
Changes are reloaded while running. Fuzzel remains installed for Display Settings.

Command runs in an ordinary Wayland desktop, including Ubuntu's default
Wayland session. It is launched as Command in the app menu, or as litty in a
terminal. The shared gravitas-ui toolkit is compiled into the app, so no
separate Gravitas chrome library or compositor is required. Windows request
the compositor's controls and draw their own when the desktop does not provide
them, including on GNOME. The shared gravitas-themes data package provides Dark and
OLED blackout presets for standalone apps as well as the desktop. The skin option
[chrome] match_content = true matches the titlebar to the window background.

Gravitas puts Command's terminal tabs in one compact top bar, alongside its ∨, ∧ and ×
window controls. Fresh desktops use Unified chrome. Ctrl+Shift+T opens a tab and Ctrl+Tab switches tabs.
Select or close tabs in that top bar, drag them along it to reorder, or drag a
tab away to open it in another window. Fullscreen and other Wayland desktops
keep Command's own tab bar. Update both Command and the desktop to use native
tabs, then log back into Gravitas; older compositors keep the local bar.

The Gravitas desktop default is the original animated Coswall sky: nebulae, 4,500 stars and three
lensing black holes. Scroll bare desktop space to pan its celestial camera. In the
existing [background] table in compositor.toml, set effect = "none" for the plain
background, or effect = "coswall" to enable Coswall. Custom configurations retain
their existing background unless you opt in. Optional system-playback reactivity
is enabled with [coswall] audio_reactive = true in compositor.toml (place the key
on its own line beneath the table header). It never captures a microphone.
Audio capture and sky animation stop while locked, during startup, when every
output is off or fullscreen, or with reduced/off motion; ordinary sky motion works without an audio service. Desktop-wide wallpaper distortion
and liquid focus effects require the Gravitas session.
Lanternwood, Moonglass and Foxglove Hollow are native mesh wallpapers with simulated
water, reflections, wind and particles. Select them in Settings > Appearance, or
use effect = "lanternwood", "moonglass" or "foxglove-hollow" in [background].
The old "haunted-forest" selection now uses Lanternwood. Their matching palettes
are available in Settings > Skins. Geometry ships in the desktop-only gravitas-wallpapers package; no
browser, online service or downloaded image is needed. Log back into Gravitas
after upgrading the compositor to activate these renderers.

X11-only sessions are not supported by Command in this preview.
The drop-down terminal needs layer-shell support, which GNOME does not offer;
ordinary windows work without it.

Reap is a native task manager with sortable CPU, memory, disk, live TCP and GPU
resource columns, expandable application/process families, hardware graphs, and
structured inspection. Unreadable or unsupported counters show as unavailable.
RSS includes shared pages; optional PSS/private-memory sampling offers another
comparison. Confirmed process actions include exit/force quit, suspend/resume,
nice priority, CPU affinity and I/O priority. Other users' processes and system
service actions require administrator authorization. Optional private recordings
include command lines and can be reopened for comparison; TCP diagnostics do not
include UDP/QUIC or sockets that close between samples.
Open Reap from your app menu or run gravitas-reap. Its shared Gravitas UI is
compiled in, and it runs in an ordinary Wayland desktop without Command or
the Gravitas compositor installed.

Type (text/Markdown editor), Capture (screen/window recording) and Drill (file
browser) are available as standalone apps and are included with the desktop.
Drill manages local files with tabs, list/grid views, raster thumbnails, bookmarks,
multiple selection, clipboard and file drops, copy/move/create/rename, batch rename,
Open With defaults, Trash and restore, permissions, and search. File operation undo
restores unchanged results. Archive jobs create ZIP or tar.gz files and extract ZIP/tar
into new folders; links and special archive entries are refused. Extraction is
limited to 100,000 entries and 2 GiB of expanded data. Its file chooser backend
is included; the existing session chooser route is preserved until application
and modal-dialog acceptance has passed. Command
accepts dropped files as quoted paths; press Enter yourself to run a command.
Image, Documents, Calculator, Clocks, Listen, Video, Storage, Backups and Software
are also available as standalone apps and included with the desktop. Their first
release scope and remaining features are documented in the app specifications.

Network settings opens NetworkManager's profile editor for enterprise Wi-Fi, VPN,
static IPv4/IPv6 addresses, routes and DNS. The desktop installs that editor and
the OpenVPN plugin. Other VPN types may require their NetworkManager plugin.
Devices & power provides Bluetooth, built-in backlight and power-profile controls
when supported by the system. Clock formats are in Taskbar Properties.

Updates: download and run the latest installer again. Updates take effect
when you reopen the app or next log into Gravitas. There is no automatic
update service in this preview.

Removal (from your other desktop):
  bash install.sh --uninstall
  bash install.sh --app command --uninstall
  bash install.sh --app reap --uninstall
The first command restores the previous boot/login settings and removes the
desktop, private X11 bridge, and appearance package. The other commands remove
Command and Reap individually.
User settings and Ubuntu dependencies are kept. Reboot to return to the previous
login manager and boot themes. To restore appearance without removing Gravitas:
  sudo gravitas-appearance restore
The appearance package also restores its settings on apt removal. If you edited
those system settings after installation, restoration stops and reports the
file to reconcile with its saved original instead of discarding your changes.
No graphics driver or autologin setting is changed.

The login setup disables the automatic on-screen keyboard and separates mirrored
active monitors before showing one login form on the primary screen. An existing
extended layout is kept. Original SDDM settings are restored on removal.

The SDDM login theme keeps an animated loading picture while signing in. On
first login, the compositor shows its own loader until the panel is ready,
then reveals the desktop with a warp. Reduced motion uses a fade; animations
off shows the ready desktop directly. A failed panel start has a bounded wait
and an error, so the loader cannot hide the desktop indefinitely. A monitor
mode change between SDDM and the compositor can still briefly blank the screen.
The greeter does not render the native lock screen's typing warp.

In the Gravitas session, the cinematic style folds the desktop into an aperture
when locking and pulls it through a wormhole lens after the lock client
successfully unlocks, including standard lock clients such as swaylock. Window
positions stay unchanged. The installed default is [lock] unlock = "cinematic"
in compositor.toml; choose unlock = "standard" for the shorter aperture
transition. Set motion = "reduced" in panel.toml in the same config directory
for a gentle fade, or motion = "off" to reveal the desktop immediately.
This compositor effect also shapes the cinematic desktop reveal; it does not
change authentication or run on other desktops. Updates preserve your settings.

Context menus animate by default, including third-party application and tray
popups. Cinematic menus use a fluid reveal and an illuminated edge. For a shorter
treatment, set animation_style = "standard" in ~/.config/gravitas/panel.toml.
The default is animation_style = "cinematic". The same file's motion = "reduced"
uses a brief fade, and motion = "off" disables the transitions. Preferences apply
live and updates preserve explicit choices. Native apps follow these preferences
on other Wayland desktops too; their menu entrances animate, while dismissal
releases the popup immediately. The Gravitas compositor supplies exit animations.

Package/configuration checks and Qt 5/6 greeter previews do not replace a real
boot, login, lock/unlock, and return-to-Ubuntu check on your target hardware.

Packages include third-party license notices in /usr/share/doc/gravitas-*.
The private xwayland-satellite executable is MPL-2.0; its exact, unmodified
source archive is supplied alongside each release. It is a separate process.

Save a default desktop in Settings > Startup layout. Save captures visible app
windows, their positions/sizes/displays and maximized/fullscreen state. It restores
once after a reboot, not every login or unlock. Disable retains the snapshot.
Documents and tabs remain app-owned; some single-instance apps cannot reopen every
saved window. gravitas-layout status shows the saved layout; restore failures are
in journalctl --user -u gravitas-layout.service. No layout is enabled until saved.