One dev turned the Linux desktop into a single app, and it's surprisingly good

Published Sep 13, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Nick Lewis is an editor at How-To Geek. He has been using computers for 20 years --- tinkering with everything from the UI to the Windows registry to device firmware. Before How-To Geek, he used Python and C++ as a freelance programmer. In college, Nick made extensive use of Fortran while pursuing a physics degree. Nick's love of tinkering with computers extends beyond work. He has been running video game servers from home for more than 10 years using Windows, Ubuntu, or Raspberry Pi OS. He also uses Proxmox to self-host a variety of services, including a Jellyfin Media Server, an Airsonic music server, a handful of game servers, NextCloud, and two Windows virtual machines. He enjoys DIY projects, especially if they involve technology. He regularly repairs and repurposes old computers and hardware for whatever new project is at hand. He has designed crossovers for homemade speakers all the way from the basic design to the PCB. Nick enjoys the outdoors. When he isn't working on a computer or DIY project, he is most likely to be found camping, backpacking, or canoeing. Most Linux distros you'll find are basically a pile of separate programs—a panel, a compositor, a window manager, and so on—all exchanging information and coordinating their behavior to create a cohesive experience. Starling takes that approach and turns it on its head—it is one single program. Starling is a desktop app disguised as a desktop environment It is a one-app desktop environment. Starling isn't a new distro or a custom Kernel; rather, it is a single 51MB app available for Ubuntu that functions as a desktop environment. During startup, you can select Starling from the session menu at the login screen, just like any other desktop environment. The real trick is how it actually operates: it replaces the shell, compositor, and window manager with a single program. To ensure the experience feels cohesive, it includes nine "built-in" apps, including a Terminal, Files, a video player, and a text editor. How does Starling actually work? The apps normally meant to live on a desktop become the desktop Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek Under normal circumstances, a GUI framework only handles a specific app—how it looks, what the buttons do, things like that. However, those needs aren't exclusive to an app. At its most basic, you could describe a desktop environment as doing basically the same thing, even if the way it does that is normally quite different. The developer of Starling decided to take the similarity very literally. A menu bar turns into a taskbar, and the blank canvas of an app becomes the entire desktop screen. Every app is a widget Inside Starling, there is no such thing as a "window" in the normal sense. Chrome is treated as a rectangle that the system lays out, clips, and animates exactly like a button in a regular app. Because most apps (except a few included apps) remain separate processes, Chrome crashing still only takes out Chrome rather than the entire "operating system." You don't need a monitor That approach has a few interesting consequences, because Starling gets to dictate where the "display" is output to. If you install the DEB inside WSL on Windows and connect via Remote Desktop, the desktop is drawn directly into the RDP session. The same trick allows you to run Starling on a headless computer with no GPU or login manager, which is something that normally requires VNC with a virtual display. The downside is speed. Software rendering can be glacial compared to GPU-accelerated rendering, so if you can use a GPU, you should. One gigantic app has practical and security drawbacks There is a lot of concentrated risk Starling's approach is interesting, but the practical downsides are pretty significant. The big one is isolation. Increasingly, modern operating systems take steps to specifically isolate applications from each other so that a security issue with one won't compromise another. However, with Starling, one process runs the screen and handles input. That makes one app a fairly central failure point. The Wayland and X11 servers are AI-generated and reviewed by a single person. That isn't to say they're bad—Starling is a very cool technical achievement, but it does mean that it hasn't been as thoroughly audited as an OS and desktop environment with an entire team of developers behind it. AI can and will produce insecure code accidentally—I'd go so far as to call it common, and a single-person team can only do so much. Your desktop is only as good as your app's GUI You also run into the problem where your desktop is only as capable as whatever GUI framework you're using. It also lacks the decades of accessibility work and hardware quirk fixes that GNOME or KDE have picked up over the years. Trying out Starling on your PC WSL or a VM is the easy option If you want to try out Starling yourself, I'd recommend using a virtual machine. It'll need to be running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Then, all you need to do is install the package using the following commands: sudo apt install gdm3 curl -fLO https://github.com/starling-build/starling/releases/download/v0.4.0/starling_0.4.0_amd64.deb sudo apt install ./starling_0.4.0_amd64.deb Basically, they fetch the file from GitHub and then install it. Then, log out, click your name, and select "Starling" from the menu that appears around the gear icon in the lower right. If you're using WSL for your VM, install the DEB like you would normally, then run starling-session, and connect using the command: mstsc /v:localhost:3390 Log out, click your name, and select "Starling" from the gear icon in the lower right. If you are using the WSL route, install the .deb in an Ubuntu 26.04 distro, run starling-session, and connect via mstsc /v:localhost:3390. Keep it in a VM for now Starling proves that you can use a GUI framework to replicate most (or perhaps all) of the functions of a desktop environment, and it is surprisingly simple to get up and running. However, it is currently under development and I can't recommend it for real daily use. Keep it in a VM as an experiment for now. It is just too new to trust it as your daily driver for anything important or sensitive.