Springchick

A Wayland compositor for Linux phones, written in Rust with Smithay and Skia

What it does

One-finger UI. Swipe up to go home, sideways to switch. Springs are interruptible mid-flight.
Live cards. Windows keep rendering through every transition — no frozen screenshots.
Home grid. Pages, drag-to-reorder, hide apps, dock. Long press for menu. Pull down to search.
Rotation. Automatic rotation for fullscreen media and games.
Hardware bindings. Full support for long/short/chorded hardware button mappings.
Keyboard. wvkbd pops up automatically, at the right scale.
Wide protocol support. Screencopy, screenshots, clipboard, idle inhibitor, session lock, external display mirroring.
Power efficient uses systemd user slices for background tasks, uclamp to ensure smooth animations, and avoids unnecessary redraws. Also supports VRR (Depending on GPU support)

Important
This project is made with LLM assist, so if you have philosophical objections to that, please don’t use it. I do not consider this to be a “slop” project as I’ve sunk a lot of time and effort into it, but I accept everyone has their own opinions on the matter.

Screenshots

App switcher Home screen Editing the home screen App library Volume OSD over an app

Install

Nightly packages are built from main and published to our registries on code.bas.es. I daily drive them, but no stability guarantees until an actual release. Versions look like 0.1.0.20260913. Initial stable release planned soon.

NixOS

The best supported path. Add the repo as a flake input and enable programs.springchick.

Nura

Needs a systemd Nura install (pmbootstrap init → systemd).

sudo curl -JO --output-dir /etc/apk/keys \
  https://code.bas.es/api/packages/marcus/alpine/key
echo 'https://code.bas.es/api/packages/marcus/alpine/edge/nightly' \
  | sudo tee -a /etc/apk/repositories
sudo apk update && sudo apk add postmarketos-ui-springchick

postmarketos-ui-springchick pulls in springchick plus the session bits (wvkbd + its systemd user unit, the portal stack, gnome-keyring, tinydm). If you would rather wire that up yourself, apk add springchick alone is just the compositor and its springchick-session wrapper.

Mobian / Debian

Untested by me, would love some feedback on these.

sudo curl -fsSL https://code.bas.es/api/packages/marcus/debian/repository.key \
  -o /etc/apt/keyrings/forgejo-marcus.asc
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/forgejo-marcus.asc] https://code.bas.es/api/packages/marcus/debian trixie nightly' \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/springchick.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install springchick

Arch

Untested by me, would love some feedback on these.

curl -fsSL https://code.bas.es/api/packages/marcus/arch/repository.key \
  | sudo pacman-key --add -
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key [email protected]

The lsign-key step is required, or pacman -Sy rejects the repo database as “unknown trust”. Then append to /etc/pacman.conf:

[springchick-nightly]
Server = https://code.bas.es/api/packages/marcus/arch/springchick-nightly/$arch

sudo pacman -Sy springchick

Starting it

All packages ship a Wayland session (/usr/share/wayland-sessions/springchick.desktop), so greetd or GDM will list springchick. /usr/share/springchick/config.example.toml documents every option at its default — copy it to /etc/springchick/config.toml or ~/.config/springchick/config.toml.

Building the packages yourself: packaging/README.md .

Roadmap

Closer integration with waydroid
Home screen Folder / Widget support
Richer search
Initial 0.1 release

Source Code

The Authorative home for this repo is https://code.bas.es/marcus/springchick/ - Github is a mirror to allow easier contributions and visibility.