Otto is a visually focused desktop system and Wayland compositor designed around smooth animations, gestures, and spatial interaction.
Built in Rust on top of LayersEngine and using Skia for rendering, it aims to offer a refined desktop experience inspired by familiar macOS-style interactions while also serving as an experimental platform for advancing the Linux desktop. The project is currently in a testing phase, with many features already usable and others still under active development.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Designed around smooth animations, gestures, and spatial interaction.
- Includes workspace management with animated switching and drag-and-drop window movement.
- Provides a Dock task manager for running, minimised, and pinned applications.
- Offers an app switcher with application metadata and window cycling.
- Includes an Exposé-style overview with window previews and show-desktop support.
- Supports theming with dark and light modes.
- Provides screen sharing through an XDG Desktop Portal backend and PipeWire.
- Implements a broad set of Wayland protocols including XDG shell and layer shell.
Website: github.com/nongio/otto
Support:
Developer: Riccardo Canalicchio
License: MIT License
Otto is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Stacking Wayland Compositors | |
|---|---|
| KWin | Window manager for the KDE Plasma Desktop |
| Wayfire | 3D Wayland compositor, inspired by Compiz |
| labwc | Lab Wayland Compositor |
| Waybox | Minimalist Wayland compositor |
| Enlightenment | Window manager and desktop environment |
| wlmaker | Wayland compositor inspired by Window Maker |
| Weston | Lightweight and functional Wayland compositor |
| Miriway | Mir based Wayland compositor |
| Woodland | wlroots-based window-stacking compositor for Wayland |
| hikari | Actively developed on FreeBSD but also supports Linux |
| croissant | Written in C |
| Otto | Visually focused desktop system and Wayland compositor |
| Hopalong | Simple Wayland compositor with a feature set that’s comparable to XFWM |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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