* Add Live Activities as configurable bar items
* Fix activity owner monitoring and Morph list interactions
* Keep activity rows stable during updates and tighten their layout
* Use subtle theme tint for activity cards
* Tighten activity title and progress spacing
* Use theme accent for active progress rings
* Fit compact activities to measured titles and badge
* Expose Live Activities display controls in Settings
* Open activity terminals and streamline the Morph header
* Give Morph continuous icons and prioritize workspace navigation
* Show activity progress inside its ring
* Inset activity progress rings and strengthen their stroke
* Fix activity lifecycle, command output handling and list navigation
* Reduce activity update work and harden publisher lifetimes
* Set up Live Activities for the detected user shell during installation
* Document Activities setup, daily use and troubleshooting
* Preserve Morph idle width across empty activity updates
* Fix dimming flicker, hide inactive music tab and consolidate Activities docs
* Fix panel clearance across styles and match previews to theme settings
* Prevent panel blur from repainting neighboring islands
---------
Co-authored-by: Samuel Onoja <[email protected]>
Panel appearance now applies to the whole panel, with seven styles: Floating, Capsules, Notch, Edge to edge, Fused islands, Adaptive and Morph.
- Share composition, geometry, and motion through the renderer-independent `ferese-panel` crate, including native materials, input regions, and Settings previews.
- Add the Morph hub with media, calendar, notifications, controls, workspace previews, hover feedback, and attached mode. Keep recording and low-battery status visible and respect window clearance.
- Cache workspace preview geometry, draw thumbnails directly, centralize Morph transitions, and keep rendering settings local to each shell instance.
- Put Record Screen in the Morph header and show the display control only when an external monitor is connected. Update panel documentation, the desktop screenshot, and native check style names.
Local validation included 660 compositor tests, 191 shell tests, isolated preview-cache checks, GPU Morph captures at 1×/1.25×/1.5×, formatting, and Clippy with warnings denied. The final header change passed all 23 Morph tests. Release workflow jobs are skipped for this PR.
* Package Ferese for Fedora and Arch releases
* Build release packages alongside workspace checks
* Include dependency licenses and software GPU test drivers
* Limit package checks to release PRs and fix Arch Cargo dependency
* Prepare Ferese 0.1.0-beta
* Release config locks before closing inherited file descriptions
* Install the lock PAM policy for native release checks
* Include xauth in distribution package test dependencies
* Regenerate Arch Git package metadata
* Run package checks with an explicit UTC timezone
* Remove unused bundled fonts and accept installed license receipts
* Format the system font test helper
* Load an installed font for headless text rendering checks
* Isolate package test runtimes and reap container child processes
* Coordinate config writes and gate releases on desktop validation
* Use toolkit rc.2 with painting and session lock fixes
* Ignore retired desktop widget settings in existing configs
Pin the Iced/libcosmic candidate that paints contour interiors directly and reduces rectangular clipping work. Keep WGPU as the default and update all consumers consistently.
Repeated panel updates rebuilt unchanged controls and SVG artwork, cloned composition data, and kept unused workspace icon resources. This reuses controls when their layout stays the same, bounds the SVG cache, removes temporary layout allocations, and releases icon resources when apps close or the workspace style changes.
Rapidly closing a modal could also leave a native surface behind when its asynchronous creation finished after the close. Late openings now get destroyed when their owner is gone. Ferese uses the published `ferese-v0.1.2` Iced/libcosmic fixes so a temporary software buffer/viewport size mismatch retries the frame instead of crashing.
Two runs per version of the same workspace/overview/reload workload measured **26% fewer allocated bytes and 23% fewer allocation calls**. A separate 1,800-cycle notification/modal stress run retained about **40 MiB less shell memory**, including shared-buffer retention falling from 28.2 MiB to 272 KiB. These are measured workload results, not an overall desktop speedup claim.
Validation:
- 1,350 workspace tests passed, including GPU Settings text rendering (50 optional tests ignored); formatting and Clippy passed.
- Native continuous/island panel tests passed rapid notification resizing, modal cancellation, and live material/input-region changes.
- A Wayland lifetime trace confirmed all 280 created modal surfaces were destroyed; longer DHAT traces and Intel GPU memory measurements were checked separately.
- All installation binaries rebuilt and the installation bundle passed inventory and checksum verification.
* Integrate panel composition, adaptive sizing, and overflow
* Add instance editing controls to panel settings
* Add panel group editing and measured composition preview
* Reorganize panel settings and add drag-and-drop item editing
* Simplify panel settings and place inspectors beside the editor
* Refine Panel & Shell settings, previews, and panel rendering
* Organize settings navigation and modernize packaged panel config
* Support top and bottom panels and refine shell surfaces
Add edge-aware settings, previews, popup placement, notifications, margins, and corner rendering. Preserve translucency in notification and dialog controls, and tighten spacing around the clock and display-mode icon.
* Add workspace styles and fix Settings text rendering
* Make panel allocation independent of measurement order
* Normalize panel item settings and visibility
* Move shell geometry into each panel
* Add independent group surfaces and finalize panel configuration
* Keep panel fit checks and restoration consistent with allocation
* Reject unknown panel item options and namespace metadata
* Reject invalid shell startup configuration and remove old radius fields
* Discover workspace application icons in a background task
* Remove the panel architecture document and improve reference prose
* Let panel media fill available space and improve Settings scrolling
* Preserve panel labels across clipped GPU rendering
* Use matching alpine lake wallpapers for light and dark modes
* Fix panel accessibility and popup lifecycle
Apply Reduce Transparency to panel opacity in the shell, compositor, and
Settings preview. Reject unknown theme tokens before snapshot substitution
and validate the current geometry fields in both consumers.
Dismiss popovers and workspace tooltips after panel layout changes. Handle
bar pointer exits directly and recover workspace hover after reentry without
repeated motion updates. Cover the transitions with regression tests and
update the wallpaper dimensions check for the bundled lake defaults.
* Use tagged Ferese toolkit fixes
* Fix center-only panel spacing and headless text rendering
* Bundle native 4K abstract wallpapers for both appearances
* Dismiss workspace tooltips before captured pointer dispatch
* Verify installed JPEG wallpapers when replacing a release
Store decoded pixels and RGB conversion scratch in anonymous mappings so dropping an image releases its pages. Reclaim decoder scratch on the worker thread after each load.
Verify PNG, JPEG and WebP pixels against the existing decoder and cover decode limits and corrupt files. Add an isolated release memory regression for repeated 4K wallpaper loads.
Use shared corner geometry for shell controls, window clipping, materials and blur masks. Preserve circular pills and controls where appropriate, track contour changes in damage, and use tagged ferese-shape and libcosmic dependencies.
Detect wallpaper image formats from their contents so extensionless portal copies render on the desktop and lock screen. Preserve decode limits and cover extensionless files with regression tests.
Remove the Bluetooth icon from the status bar.
Resolve light, dark and automatic appearance centrally and publish live theme snapshots to native surfaces and the appearance portal. Add paired preset families, custom theme imports, accessibility transforms and contrast-safe transitions.
Refine the Settings gallery and Auto controls, move overrides under advanced customization, and share palette-aware switches and circular slider thumbs. Document configuration and include theme licenses and integration coverage.
Add consent, zones and outside-edge barriers, connection-scoped leases, bounded input queues and keyboard/pointer forwarding. Restore local input on release, locking, topology or keymap changes, receiver loss and emergency escape. Preserve held-key state and distinguish finger stops from absent scroll axes.
Validation: independent review cleared; 5 native InputCapture unit tests; 32 portal tests; official D-Bus contract checks on a private bus; real installed libei receiver interoperability test. Live physical barrier and consent interaction remain to be checked in a desktop session.
Render selected toplevels through a private portal-only capture protocol, preserve logical snapshot geometry, and renegotiate PipeWire video on window resizing. Bound outstanding snapshots and retry temporary contention; stop on source closure and session locking.
Validation: portal unit tests (31), capture budget unit, private-bus portal contracts, and real nested/PipeWire isolation, workspace, resize, close and paused-lock tests pass. Independent review cleared. Monitor restore integration timed out on both this build and the unchanged previous compositor under the current nested host.
Centralize native palettes, presets, typography, controls, menus, calendar rendering, and icon assets in ferese-theme. Reuse the shared components across the shell, settings, lock screen, authentication prompt, and screen-sharing chooser.
Attach themed dialogs to compositor-owned materials, correct backdrop capture and sampling across output transforms, smooth patterned backgrounds, and prevent clipped picker buttons with the configured shell font.
Add compact branded Settings with safe atomic edits, external config refresh and a draggable sidebar. Reconcile services, update connected displays and input devices, apply live layout policy and window rules, and resolve initial floating placement before tiled insertion. Package the Settings launcher and shared Ferese icon.
Render a tinted, scrollable workspace strip with live thumbnails, output-scaled font labels and a subtle selected-workspace outline. Keep the window grid background-free and support workspace selection without exiting overview.
Animate strip opacity independently with precise fade tolerances and continuous reversal, and expose toggle-overview through feresectl.
Samuel Onoja