Starling: The First Real Desktop Written Entirely by AI
Starling: The first real desktop written by AI
Starling is the first functional desktop environment built by AI, directed by a single person over six months. Unlike previous browser-based mockups, it drives the GPU directly and runs external applications like Chrome, Slack, and Zoom. This project proves that the labor barrier for building complex Linux desktops has collapsed, enabling rapid innovation.
The interesting consequence isn't Starling. It's the ten desktops after it — attempted by people who never had a decade to give, who would have looked at the size of the job and picked a smaller one.
- loopmonster
AI prose is great at celebrating whatever you told it to celebrate, but it always misses the most important detail: why should I care?
- joshcorbin
So basically it's really similar to Niri, but with a widget framework and bar bolted into it, and a rather nice glass shader; imo it's not AI that made the "cost of building a desktop" collapse, but rather the iceberg of architecture and prior art that is the burgeoning scene of other tiling wayland compositors, like Niri, River, Hyprland, Sway, etc...
- VCFundedGenYer
I don't understand why this exists or why anyone would use it. It just looks like Cinnamon with a b00merang macOS skin. So if there's a critical bug or security vulnerability, are you prepared to support it? If not, why bother making this? Everyone will rather opt for one of the proven distros/desktops.
- gen2brain
Well, AI or not, it is interesting to see Swift and Flutter without Dart. But is SNI Tray there? I see something in the top-right corner of that panel, but I'm not sure what it is.
- mindwok
This post makes me feel grief. I mean no offence to you OP, this looks like a beautiful desktop and I am sure there was a lot of time put into this. But just sharing my grief.
3 years ago if I saw a post on the HN front page about a desktop environment written in Flutter (or a Swift port of Flutter), I'd be absolutely blown away.
Now, I see this, and I feel nothing. I'm not impressed. I don't want to know how it works. I'm not going to read 300k lines of AI slop code. I don't care about architectural decisions made because they're not made under any true constraints. I'm not even excited about the AI part of it, because I know AI can do this. We could all build this if we just prompt hard enough.
I'm tired, boss.