Starling is a new open source Linux desktop environment. One developer built it by directing Claude for about six months, ending up with a working desktop that boots into its own session with a compositor and window manager.Don't think of this as a themed shell bolted onto GNOME or KDE either. It brings its own X11 server, so apps like Chrome, Slack, and Zoom run on it without requiring any special modifications.🚧This is a vibe-coded desktop environment, still an early preview built mostly through AI prompts rather than a full engineering team. Expect bugs, security issues, missing settings, and rough edges throughout.What is Starling?Every part of it, like the shell, the compositor, the window manager, and the apps, are written in Swift, a language that has hardly been used for a Linux desktop before.Most of the heavylifting here has been done using Claude, which was instructed to follow things like "Wayland only. Do not read, modify, or reference X11Server/ or X11 launch paths unless explicitly asked."Under the hood, the framework running the whole desktop is a full port of Flutter's Dart framework to Swift. Starling brings a Wayland compositor written in C and its own X11 server, so older X11 apps still work.That combination is what actually makes it a desktop rather than a demo.For features, it has things like:A dock and Launchpad (app launcher).Floating and tiling window management.A shader-based glass effect on the dock and panels.Five first-party apps, including Terminal and an apt-powered App Store.Taking it for a runI tested Starling on an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS virtual machine, and its rough edges showed up almost immediately. Right after logging in, the resolution defaulted to a non-standard, letterboxed widescreen ratio of 5120x2160 at 2x scaling (according to Fastfetch).I tried searching for an option to change this in the Settings menu, and the "Displays" page only had a slider for scaling, nothing for resolution itself. Things might be better if you install it on a computer directly, but that's a risk you are more than welcome to take. 🙂‍↔️A few smaller things didn't work either. The search bar inside the Launchpad (app launcher) doesn't respond to typing, and none of the accent color swatches in Appearance actually apply once clicked.The App Store itself works, technically. I installed Chrome through it without any errors, but the browser opened up oversized and ran noticeably laggy once it loaded. Not exactly the experience you'd want from one of the few apps the store puts at the top of its list.Shutting the system down turned into its own small hunt. There's no power menu anywhere on the desktop, so I had to go into the Terminal and run sudo shutdown to turn it all off.Early stages of abandonware?Starling probably won't be the last project like this. If one developer directing an AI can produce a working desktop environment, compositor and all in about six months, expect a lot more attempts over the coming years.Building something and keeping it alive are two very different jobs. Vibe coding gets you off the ground fast. Debugging what it produces is painfully slow, and that grind is usually what kills a developer's motivation before the project gets anywhere.Installing StarlingStarling packages as a single DEB, built for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on amd64. You will have to ensure that you have a Wayland-capable login manager (which the Desktop LTS release ships with).From there, download and install the package:curl -fLO https://github.com/starling-build/starling/releases/download/v0.2.1/starling_0.2.1-1_amd64.debsudo apt install ./starling_0.2.1-1_amd64.debNext, you have to either log out or reboot, then at the login screen click your name, open the session menu (a small gear icon at the bottom-right), and pick "Starling" from the list.Mind you, it is quite early for this desktop. Currently on v0.2.1, the project itself is being handled by an anonymous human developer (or maybe AGI 😱?), so I would test it on a spare machine.