Ballad

A simple, customizable, themable, and functional desktop environment for tiling window managerwith a focus on Wayland.

You'll never switch back to GNOME.

At this stage in development, Ballad looks like this:

Ballad will have first class support for Niri as well as more common TWMs like Sway and Hyprland. In the future, X11 TWMs like i3 may get support. Niri is the only TWM currently supported. (feel free to make a PR for your TWM of choice!)

At this stage in development, Ballad looks like this:

Crates

Ballad is split into several smaller crates all held in the packages directory:

• ballad-config: Writing, reading, serializing, and deserializing config files for all Ballad apps.
• ballad-services: GObject abstractions over system APIs including audio, battery, and config files.
• ballad-shell: Ballad's sidebar, power menu, quick settings, and search anywhere.

TODO Crates

Some aspects of Ballad are a work in progress! These are the crates that need to be implemented.

• ballad-search: Ballad's search anywhere implementation.
• ballad-greeter: A simple greetd greeter that discovers users using AccountsService.
• ballad-settings: A full settings UI for every configurable aspect of Ballad.
• ballad-cli: A simple CLI tool for configuring and interacting with Ballad.

Building

In order to build and run all ballad crates you need a few dependencies installed:

• pkg-config
• gtk4
• gtk4-layer-shell
• glib
• librsvg
• cairo
• alsa-lib

For Nix users, there is a devshell with all of these dependencies included.