The full monty

An opinionated desktop: decided once, so that a new machine arrives finished instead of as a list of choices.

The Copal desktop: Art Nouveau lilies on the wallpaper, a large amber clock, the bar across the top, and the application menu open.
Super+A. The application menu, laid out the way Linux Mint's is, over the theme's Art Nouveau wallpaper. The clock is part of the wallpaper; the bar shows workspaces, the focused window, and the machine's load.

01Hyprland, on Wayland

The full level installs Hyprland, a tiling Wayland compositor. Windows arrange themselves: open two and they share the screen, open a third and they share it again, with nothing to drag and no corner to resize. Nine workspaces sit one key away each. The compositor draws with the GPU — rounded corners, soft shadows and a little blur — and in a UTM virtual machine that is the Mac's own GPU, reached through virgl. Where only software rendering is available, Copal's graphics check says so, and says why, instead of leaving a slow desktop to be puzzled over.

The session belongs to your own account, never to root, and it can start at boot with an automatic login. X11 and i3 stay installed beside it as the fallback; one word in /etc/copal/session decides which desktop the machine boots into.

02Linux Antiquity

The look is Linux Antiquity by diinki: a theme built on an aesthetic deliberately detached from computing — art nouveau, old scientific illustration, and the personified suns and moons of classical astronomy. Its palette runs from aged paper to amber to ink. This website is set in the same palette, read out of the theme's own configuration.

What is standing in. The theme's own bar, radial taskbar and widgets are written for quickshell, which Alpine does not package. Copal draws the bar with waybar in the theme's palette instead, and its launcher decides at login which shell to run — so the day Alpine packages quickshell, the theme's real shell takes over with nothing edited.

03Your hands, on the keyboard or the mouse

Everything can be done from the keyboard, and nothing requires it. The keys are the real bindings from the configuration the installer writes; the full list is one key away, and is shown at the first login.

Super ⏎a terminal (foot)
Super Drun a program by name
Super Athe application menu
Super Zthe system menu
Super ⇧ CCopal Apps
Super Efiles
Super Ffullscreen
Super 1…9workspaces
Super Qclose the window
Super ⇧ Sscreenshot a region
Super /every binding, listed

04Copal Apps

Every graphical program Copal offers is in one window, grouped on shelves, each with its picture, two sentences saying what it is, where it comes from, what it needs, and whether it is installed. Installing one opens its slide: the program arriving, its steps ticked off, and three bars — the run, the program, and the compile itself.

Copal Apps: shelves on the left, the list of programs in the middle, and darktable in full on the right with its picture, description, and build dependencies.
The list. Shelves, programs and their status, and one program in full.
Copal Apps' progress page: Naev being installed, its picture and description, and three progress bars, the innermost reading 884 of 992.
The slideshow. Naev compiling: program 2 of 3, its install step, 884 of 992 build steps done.

05Programs that arrive with it

The full monty installs sixteen programs at the first login, while the slideshow runs: games, photography, writing, animation, recording, disc burning, scanning and duplicate finding. Where Alpine's package is current and stable, it is used; where upstream is ahead, the program is compiled on the machine from its pinned release.

darktable's lighttable.
darktable 5.6. Raw photo development, compiled here with every format and its Lua scripts.
Ardour's editor with an empty session.
Ardour 9.8. A recording studio, from ardour.org's own source.
Naev's main menu over a starfield.
Naev. Space trading and combat with a long written story.
Taisei's title menu.
Taisei. A bullet-hell shooter in the Touhou tradition.
Pencil2D's main window with its timeline.
Pencil2D. Frame-by-frame animation with onion skins.
K3b's welcome screen with New Data Project and Copy Medium.
K3b. CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray, written and verified.

06Also in the box