01
Fade.
Smooth opening and closing transitions, including interrupted animations.
Beta · v0.3.0-beta.2
A new layer for your X11 desktop.
Meet Compust: a minimal compositor taking shape in Rust. Animations, blur, and transparency for your existing Xorg or XLibre session.
02
Blur.
Background blur behind translucent windows, scaled down and back up with bilinear XRender sampling.
03
Transparency.
Application alpha, window opacity, and your global setting, composed together.
04
Rounded corners.
Rounded window corners, with the shadows and blur that follow them, set globally or per window.
01 / The idea
Keep the desktop yours.
Your X server handles the display. Your window manager arranges the windows. Compust adds the final visual layer, with a small codebase that people can understand and improve.
Inspired by picom and the tradition of standalone X11 compositors, Compust explores an approachable Rust implementation. Reliability, resource use, and frame pacing are improvements to measure as the project grows.
X11 first. Built for Xorg and XLibre; native Wayland is outside the current scope.
Fourth beta published. Next: 1.0.
Version 0.3.0-beta.2 brings shadows, rounded corners, fullscreen unredirection, rules by focus, and reloads when the configuration is saved. One recorded desktop has run its code so far, on Xorg under i3. The 1.0 milestone lists what a stable release still needs.
Read the 1.0 milestone02 / Progress
What is done, and what 1.0 still needs.
Done
0.1 foundation
XRender composition, fades, transparency, and blur, checked by pixel tests against a real X server.
Published
First beta
Four gates met for its declared scope: window stability, monitors, real desktops, and distribution. Released as 0.2.0-beta.1 to beta.3.
In 0.3.0-beta.1
Configuration reload and rules
Configuration discovery, reload without a restart, per-window rules, and blur weighted by opacity.
In 0.3.0-beta.1
Rendering work
Compust benchmark scenes, region repaint, blur reuse, and occlusion, measured on one desktop.
Opt-in in 0.3.0-beta.1
GPU renderer
OpenGL ES through DRI3, matching XRender within two levels of color on one recorded desktop. XRender stays the default.
In 0.3.0-beta.2
Rounded corners
Window corners rounded with their shadows and the blur behind them, in both renderers, recorded on one display.
Current milestone
1.0 stable release
Its features are in 0.3.0-beta.2: shadows, fullscreen unredirection, and rules by focus. Still to come: NVIDIA and more desktops, endurance runs, and outside testers.
03 / Tested environments
Three machines with recorded sessions.
AMD · XLibre and Xorg
Radeon Vega desktop
Xmonad on XLibre, on one and two monitors: desktop scenarios with fades, translucency, and blur, monitor changes, and both cables unplugged and reconnected. i3 on Xorg: desktop scenarios, and shadows, focus, and fullscreen suspension in both renderers.
Intel · Xorg
Iris Plus laptop
Xmonad, Openbox, and i3. Desktop scenarios, an external display unplugged and reconnected, and suspend and resume.
AMD · XLibre
Radeon RX 9060 XT desktop
Xmonad, Openbox, i3, bspwm, and dwm. Desktop scenarios with 0.3.0-beta.1, configuration reloads, Compust benchmark scenes, and the GPU renderer.
Every push also runs 132 X11 tests against Xvfb. Most hardware sessions use synthetic test windows, and the Intel laptop and the XLibre sessions of the Radeon Vega desktop were recorded with the 0.2.0 betas, before the rendering work. NVIDIA drivers and other window managers are untested. See every record in the compatibility matrix.
04 / Documentation
From first build to first contribution.
Getting started
Requirements, installation, configuration, and current limits.
Beta testing
Install the beta, return to your previous compositor, and report problems.
Architecture
Follow a window from an X11 event to the final frame.
Roadmap
The beta gates, recorded progress, and the 1.0 milestone.
Contributing
Set up your environment, run tests, and prepare a pull request.
Help shape the next frame.
Test a driver, report a rendering issue, improve a translation, or work on the renderer. Contributions in English and Brazilian Portuguese are welcome.