Introduction
Atrium is a workspace-driven tiling Wayland compositor, and the desktop built around it, for Void Linux.
An atrium is the central courtyard of a Roman house. Every room opens onto it, each with a purpose, a fixed location, things that belong there. You stand in the atrium and go to any room. You don’t scroll through rooms. You don’t tag them. You go where you need to be.
Workspaces are rooms. A window belongs to exactly one workspace. Bringing a workspace to a monitor swaps it with whatever was there. The work of managing windows lives in spatial memory, not in your head.
What is in the box
| Component | What it is |
|---|---|
atrium | The compositor. A fork of niri with a fixed workspace model and five tiling algorithms. |
atrium-shell | The bar and panels, as one quickshell configuration. |
atrium-network | Wifi, wired, and VPN management on wpa_supplicant, dhcpcd, and openvpn. |
atrium-portal | The xdg-desktop-portal backend for screen sharing. |
atrium-setup | System configuration for a Void install: seatd, doas, pam_rundir, greetd, theming, logging. |
Principles
- Do one thing well. The compositor manages windows. Bars, notifications, launchers, lock screens are separate programs speaking standard Wayland protocols and the compositor’s IPC.
- Workspaces, not tags. No multi-membership, no bitmasks, no ambiguity about where a window is.
- Keyboard-first. Every action has a binding, handled by the compositor itself. No hotkey daemon.
- Minimal runtime. No systemd, no elogind, no polkit, no D-Bus activation of session services. seatd, doas, and pam_rundir do the job.
- Understand every piece. The desktop is a sum of small parts you can read and replace.
Status
Pre-release. The compositor and shell bar are the author’s daily desktop; nothing is packaged yet. Getting started builds it from source on an existing Void install. The status page tracks the line to packages and an ISO.
Where things are
Source and issue trackers: git.efpsoftware.org/atrium. Security reports: security@atrium-project.org, policy in Security policy.