Home
Lightweight Desktop Environment
- Lumina is designed to have a small footprint, giving your system the best performance possible.
Intuitive Layout
- Lumina is built to flow seamlessly between computer tasks and offers several integrated utilities in one convenient package.
Completely Customizable
- Nearly everything in the interface can be configured to suit the individual workflow. From desktop icons and single-application systems to multi-monitor arrangements or a plethora of self-contained workspaces, Lumina can do it all.
Freely Available
- Lumina is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license, allowing it to be used by anyone, anywhere (including in proprietary distributions).
Lumina has been written from scratch
- Written in C++/Qt5 and is not based on any existing desktop’s code-base, and does not use any of the Linux-based desktop frameworks (ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, D-Bus, systemd, etc..)
Lumina uses a simple built-in interface layer
- Communicate directly with the operating system (which is the only class specific to the operating system – making it simple to port/customize). Allows Lumina® to obtain system information in a fast and efficient manner while ensuring desktop stability and reliability.
Recent News
Help requested for three big items for Lumina
2022-02-08
In this post I mentioned some of the major work that is on the road map for Lumina, and I’ve finally made the time to expand on this a little more.
In this post, I’m going to cover three of the big-ticket items I need help with.
However, before I get into that, a few points worth mentioning. C++/Qt experience is a definite requirement. It’s not that I have anything against Python or Go, but Lumina is written with C++/Qt, so that’s what you’ll need to know. Along with that, you will need to be willing to submit your code contributions under a BSD 3-Clause.
...Lumina 1.6.2 released.
2021-12-25
Another update to Lumina is out
The next update to the Lumina Desktop is out!
Updates in this release:
-
Lumina-checkpass has been disabled. I mistakingly enabled this in the 1.6.1 release. After speaking with Ken about this, he reminded me that this is a part of the yet-unfinished Unified Desktop. As such it is not needed with the current releases and has been disabled from being built by default.
...
Lumina 1.6.1 released.
2021-10-05
Yes the project is still alive.
And in fact, there’s been a release!
Lumina Desktop v1.6.1
It’s only been 611 days… that’s not too long, right?
Anyway onto the point, yes the project is still alive and there’s been some updates. This release encompasses two main things.
First is a collection of minor fixes that have gone into master since 1.6.0 came out, along with some translation updates. This includes two small additional binaries for use by the desktop.
...Study the past if you would define the future.
2021-07-01
History
“Study the past if you would define the future.” ~Confucius
Before we discuss the Lumina Desktop today, let’s first go back and discuss the past. The Lumina Desktop was started in 2012 by Ken Moore. He started working on it in his free time. He wanted to design a small lightweight desktop for PC-BSD that didn’t come with the challenge of dealing with Linux-isms. However, instead of designing a desktop that had BSD-isms, he decided to design the desktop to be as OS agnostic as possible with as few dependencies as possible. In time, Lumina became the default desktop for PC-BSD. In early 2014 the Lumina code from the PC-BSD git repo was moved to Github.
...