denial

A Wayland compositor. We got a little carried away.

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Install · Edit the shell · Documentation

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2c7335bb-7363-46b1-8e3a-0d98c36c64b1

Features

• Stacking, tiling, and scrolling tiling layouts.
• Workspaces and touchpad gestures. Plenty of room for projects you'll definitely finish someday.
• Smooth animations and transitions.
• Blur and customizable glass. Subtlety is available in Settings.
• Light and dark themes. Pick an accent color or borrow one from your wallpaper.
• Settings for layouts, displays, input, shortcuts, and appearance. It's a desktop. You should be able to configure it with a mouse.
• Live shell editing and hot reload.
• Wayland and X11 apps (through Xwayland), multiple monitors, screenshots, and screen sharing.

Hyprland and niri users are welcome. We won't tell.

Support Denial

There are easier hobbies than writing a compositor. Unfortunately, we like this one.

If you like where Denial is going, help fund its development.

Sponsor Denial

Install

Denial is in public beta. It runs on Linux. Someone got it running on StarryOS's starry-kernel too. Apparently one kernel wasn't enough. Linux builds support x86-64 and ARM64. Configuration and developer interfaces may change before 1.0.

First-party Linux binary packages are currently x86-64. For the distributions below, review the repository setup script, then add the signed repository:

curl -fsSL https://install.denialwm.org | sh

Setup shows its plan and asks for confirmation before using sudo. Once it finishes, install Denial with the command for your distribution:

Alpine Linux 3.24 has signed APK downloads. ARM64 builds are supported from source; NixOS and Void Linux have also been tested, with no first-party binaries yet.

After installing, choose Denial from your display manager's session menu.

Installation, updates, and removal · Session setup and renderer options

Edit the shell

The shell's UI is editable Flutter code. With the development tools installed, change a widget, save, and watch your desktop update while your Wayland apps keep running. Try to remember what you were supposed to be working on.

The optional denial-ui-development package is available only through the Pacman repository:

sudo pacman -S denial-ui-development
denialctl ui setup

Open the generated workspace's dart_shell directory in VSCodium for hot reload on save. If an edit goes wrong, denialctl ui restore gets you back to the packaged shell, even when Settings can't open.

Live development guide · Custom shell framework

Under the hood

Rust and Smithay handle Wayland, input, and displays. Flutter draws the shell and application windows together. Yes, that Flutter. It got promoted.

Explore the architecture · Build from source

Why Denial

Denial is an English word. The name contains Denia, followed by one last letter.

It is a quiet reference to Denia from Wuthering Waves. Her story never gives a simple answer to what she originally was, and that uncertainty is important. What is clear is that others treated her as an asset: something selected, shaped, and assigned a purpose that was not her own. She was meant to remain a vessel. Instead, by observing people and learning to live among them, she grew a heart and gained the ability to choose what she would become.

Her story reflects Denial's central idea: what something was made to be does not have to determine what it can become.

Made through dialogue

Denial was conceived, architected, directed, and tested by Doctor Logix, and developed in continuous collaboration with OpenAI Codex. Its initial implementation was generated through that dialogue.

Doctor Logix made the design and technical decisions, tested the results on real hardware, and sent the work back when it wasn't right. Codex investigated problems, proposed solutions, and wrote the code.

Authorship is more than typing source code.

Documentation

All guides · Control and recovery · Screenshots and screen sharing

Changelog · Roadmap · Contributing · Security

License

Denial's original source code is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. Bundled third-party components and media retain their own licenses and attribution notices.