nixconfig/DESKTOP.md

Desktop research and proposed baseline

Researched 2026-09-05 UTC. This is a proposal, not an installed desktop. Hyprland and Firefox are selected; the supporting applications below are recommendations for review. No desktop, authentication, driver or input-lock changes have been activated.

The comparison uses the current official NixOS Wiki, upstream documentation/release notes, project screenshots, and the actual package/module sources locked by this repository:

• Nixpkgs: d57af924f160a5084293c71c2043f058bd1cdb60.
• Home Manager: 65258d5c65a250189fde2e35f490d15e064c4c62.
• Package versions below are available in that pin, not necessarily current upstream releases. Screenshots illustrate upstream styling, not a locally tested session or a promise that every pictured feature exists in our pin.

Recommended small desktop

Role	Recommendation	Pinned version	Rationale / trade-off
Compositor/session	Hyprland + UWSM	0.55.4 / 0.26.4	Selected compositor; native NixOS session integration, with one owner for systemd startup/shutdown.
Browser	Firefox	154.0.1	Selected browser; keep its sandbox and ordinary browser configuration. Update freshness needs attention below.
Terminal	Alacritty (Rust)	0.17.0	Focused terminal with native Wayland support. No built-in tabs/splits; Hyprland already arranges windows. Ghostty 1.3.1 (Zig) is the richer alternative if terminal tabs, splits or image protocols are wanted.
Bar/quick settings	ashell (Rust/Iced)	0.8.0	Rounded, ready-made bar with workspaces, tray, audio controls and settings; avoids building a shell from widgets. Ironbar 0.19.0 (Rust/GTK4) is preferable for more bespoke panels/CSS.
Launcher	Anyrun (Rust/GTK4)	25.12.0	Application search with optional calculator/symbol plugins; enable only useful plugins, not indexing/network integrations by default. Fuzzel 1.14.1 (C) is the simpler alternative with a direct launch-prefix option.
Lock/idle	hyprlock + hypridle (C++)	0.9.5 / 0.1.7	Hyprland-native integration, PAM, session-lock protocol and lock-completion-aware sleep inhibition. Security and recovery matter more than implementation language here.
Notifications	mako (C)	1.11.0	Small, styleable notification daemon. SwayNotificationCenter 0.12.6 (Vala) adds a full notification drawer if that is wanted later.
Privilege prompts	hyprpolkitagent	0.1.3	Existing Home Manager session-bound integration. Soteria 0.3.1 is a genuine Rust alternative, but has session-registration considerations and a newer restart-related fix upstream.
Audio/screensharing	PipeWire + WirePlumber; Hyprland and GTK portals	—	Audio, screen capture and file-picker plumbing, not optional decoration. Use native NixOS modules.
Clipboard/screenshots	wl-clipboard; grim + slurp; Satty (Rust) for annotation	2.3.0 / 1.5.0 / 1.5.0 / 0.20.1	Normal copy/paste and area capture; annotation runs on demand. No persistent clipboard history by default.

Use a small font/icon set, restrained dark colors, modest rounding and short animations. Do not add a theme framework, custom shell framework, downloaded startup scripts, weather accounts or a second bar. This does not change the Neovim theme or any Neovim source.

Optional wallpaper tool: awww, Rust, pinned 0.12.1, if image switching/transitions are wanted. The old swww GitHub repository is archived and explicitly redirects to this renamed project; Nixpkgs warns about the old attribute. A solid background does not need another daemon.

Visual references: ashell gallery, Ironbar examples, Anyrun, Sherlock, Veila. The reviewed ashell design uses compact rounded groups and popovers; Ironbar's minimal example is a flatter, denser strip. Both are legitimate aesthetic choices.

Rust screen lockers: real candidates, not a blanket dismissal

• Veila is an attractive, standalone Rust option using ext-session-lock-v1, with a packaged build in this Nixpkgs. However, the pin has 0.4.0 and upstream 0.4.4 explicitly lists password-memory handling, daemon-authorized unlock, and fail-closed unlock-handoff fixes. Do not select the older package merely to keep the desktop Rust-based. Its daemon and PAM setup must also be declared. 0.4.4 release notes.
• Cthulock is Rust/Slint with a configurable UI and the same session-lock protocol. Latest observed release: 0.1.2, 2025-08-31. Its upstream Nix integration is an additional flake rather than a package/module already present in this pin. It is a possible experiment, not the lowest-maintenance baseline. Project.
• veiland is a newer Rust locker with process-isolated GPU plugins, including upstream reports of NVIDIA suspend/hotplug testing. That is upstream evidence, not our testing. Its extensible scene/plugin architecture is more than this minimal desktop needs. Project.
• hyprlock remains the recommendation, not a claim of audited or bug-free software. Its newer 0.9.6 release also contains PAM, rendering and output-handling fixes; review it when refreshing the pin. Release notes.

The important property is a compositor-enforced lock, not a fullscreen password window. The Wayland session-lock protocol requires the session to stay locked if the locker dies after acquiring the lock. It does not prevent authentication bugs in a client, guarantee successful initial locking, or protect against every compositor/GPU failure.

Login is separate: ReGreet and tuigreet are Rust greeters for greetd, not screen lockers. ReGreet is the graphical option; tuigreet is the smaller terminal option. A display manager remains a separate choice, not a silent addition to the EC2 host. COSMIC's greeter is not a drop-in Hyprland locker.

Compatibility details that affect implementation

1. Use the new Hyprland configuration format. The current NixOS Wiki explicitly flags its older examples as outdated: Hyprland 0.55 introduced Lua configuration. Our locked Home Manager defaults to configType = "lua" for home.stateVersion = "26.05". Write a small native hyprland.lua, using the 0.55.4 example/API, rather than copying old bind = ... examples into Lua settings. Do not change stateVersion to work around this.
2. Only one session manager. NixOS recommends programs.hyprland.withUWSM = true; disable Home Manager's separate Hyprland systemd integration. Upstream also warns UWSM adds its own quirks. Bind bar/agent services to the graphical session and launch applications through the session manager. Session documentation.
3. ashell needs small but important overrides. Its pinned default logout command is loginctl kill-user $(whoami), which is broader than logging out of the desktop and could terminate other sessions. Use uwsm stop. The pinned Home Manager service has startup ordering but no PartOf; explicitly tie its lifetime to graphical-session.target. Version 0.8 does not advertise the notification manager shown in the current 0.10 README, so do not assume it replaces mako. Pinned settings.
4. Rust does not eliminate NVIDIA rendering issues. ashell 0.8 documents startup freezes with the Vulkan backend and an application-scoped WGPU_BACKEND=gl workaround. Anyrun documents a driver-dependent GTK close/hang problem and GSK_RENDERER=ngl. Test the actual target first; apply a needed workaround only to that application on that target. Do not export these globally to integrated-graphics machines. ashell troubleshooting, Anyrun warning.
5. Anyrun's provider is already packaged correctly. Since 25.12 it needs anyrun-provider; our Nixpkgs wrapper supplies it and the plugin search path. Do not add a manual Cargo install or another flake. The applications plugin searches desktop entries, and its version-specific preprocessing hook must be used when arranging UWSM application launching.
6. Do not install the wrong Sherlock. The Rust launcher is pkgs.sherlock-launcher (0.1.14-3), and programs.sherlock in Home Manager correctly selects it. pkgs.sherlock (0.16.0) is an unrelated Python social-account search tool. Sherlock has a polished widget-style UI, but Anyrun/Fuzzel are a more focused starting point.
7. Portals and idle services already have system integration. The pinned NixOS Hyprland module adds both Hyprland and GTK portals; the latter supplies a file picker. Do not install competing portal stacks or add sleep/kill/restart hacks. The NixOS hyprlock module creates its PAM service and enables the system-provided hypridle user unit; Home Manager can supply idle configuration with package = null instead of creating another unit. A valid lock configuration is required: installing a locker is not enough.
8. Wait for locking, not an arbitrary delay. The pinned hypridle supports general.inhibit_sleep = 3, waiting for Hyprland's lock notification before releasing its sleep inhibitor, subject to logind's inhibitor timeout. It does not support the newer conditional-timeout options in current upstream documentation. Configure idle lock/display-off without silently adding automatic suspend to a development host. hypridle documentation.

RTX 4090 versus integrated graphics

Keep the shared desktop separate from a deliberately imported nvidia.nix. Do not put NVIDIA options/environment variables into every machine's common module, invent PRIME bus IDs, or reuse EC2's boot/storage configuration on a workstation.

• Intel/AMD-only targets: start with the standard kernel/Mesa graphics stack. Device-generation-specific video decoding or firmware adjustments require actual hardware identification.
• RTX 4090 target: NVIDIA's open kernel modules support Ada/RTX 4090. Use the NixOS driver module with hardware.nvidia.open = true, modesetting and power-management support. The userspace driver remains proprietary and needs a scoped unfree allowance. services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ "nvidia" ] selects the driver even for Wayland; this does not require enabling the X server.
• Pinned driver: stable and production both resolve to 595.71.05. With open modules, the pinned NixOS module selects the new kernel suspend notifier path. Enabling power management sets the appropriate module parameters without the legacy nvidia-suspend/nvidia-resume services. Do not unconditionally paste older service recipes on top.
• Suspend storage: NVIDIA recommends enough temporary backing storage for total VRAM plus about 5%; a 24-GiB 4090 needs roughly 25.2 GiB in the conservative worst case. Check the target filesystem and /tmp policy before promising reliable suspend. Do not force early KMS or hibernation configuration without checking the machine.
• Firefox video decoding is a separate question. The NVIDIA VA-API bridge's documented setup disables Firefox's RDD sandbox. Do not silently adopt that security trade-off for hardware video decoding. Native Wayland rendering and hardware video decoding are not the same feature.

Sources: official NixOS NVIDIA page, Hyprland NVIDIA guidance, NVIDIA supported GPUs, 595.71.05 power-management documentation, NVIDIA VA-API bridge.

Before implementation/activation

• Review an input refresh. Mozilla's release metadata reports 155.0.1, versus the pin's 154.0.1. Reproducible does not mean current. Review the stable Nixpkgs update, browser/locker fixes, evaluation and build separately; no input was updated during this research. Do not move to development snapshots merely for cosmetic features.
• Establish local authentication. dev currently has a locked Unix password. SSH authorization and passwordless sudo do not give a graphical greeter, locker or polkit agent a usable password. Choose and declare an appropriate credential/secret mechanism before enabling a usable local login/lock workflow. No invented password, plaintext secret in the Nix store, empty-password workaround or silent autologin.
• Keep the implementation flat: shared desktop integration, native hyprland.lua, and opt-in NVIDIA settings, with each real machine retaining its own hardware/boot module. No deep host/profile framework and no Neovim changes.

What was validated

Non-activating evaluations of candidate module compositions passed NixOS and Home Manager assertions for both Mesa-default and opt-in NVIDIA settings. They verified Lua defaults, UWSM ownership, both automatically supplied portals, PAM/idle integration without duplicate idle units, bar lifecycle/logout settings, unchanged Neovim package/source, and the NVIDIA 595 kernel-notifier parameters. These were evaluation fixtures using the existing host as a base, not bootable physical-host definitions or desktop builds.

The EC2 host exposes only a simple framebuffer DRM device, with no render node. No actual Hyprland session, hardware acceleration, screen sharing, password unlock, hotplug or suspend/resume was tested. Those checks must be run on the target machines, including wrong/correct-password behavior, locker-crash behavior, monitor changes while locked, and repeated suspend/resume with recovery access retained.