Mainstream OS is a Linux operating system built on Arch. Its desktop is Hyprland — the software that arranges your windows and decides where they go — and Hyprland is normally set up by hand, by editing text files. Here you set it up by clicking: displays, window layouts, keyboard shortcuts, the bar, the look of the whole interface, updates and repairs each get a proper settings page — a settings app, not a config file, and never a terminal. Pick a wallpaper and the whole desktop takes its colors from it. One keypress hands the machine over to a full-screen Steam session for gaming, and a graphical installer puts it all on your computer in a few minutes. Deeply featured. Genuinely friendly.
The shell — the bar, the side panels, the search box — is a lean, heavily modified version of end-4's illogical-impulse. Mainstream ships it the way Ubuntu ships GNOME: as one openly credited part of a complete operating system. Improvements from the original are still taken in periodically, and fixes found here are offered back rather than kept private. It has grown since: the dock, the app drawer, file search, the bar's layout system and its media handling, and the theme system are largely Mainstream's now. A theme saves the window styling — rounding, gaps, blur, shadows, opacity, animations — along with the per-app window rules, the app style, the icon and cursor themes, the font choices, the wallpaper, and the colors, which are still generated by end-4's color engine. It all exports to one file that imports on another computer, wallpaper included, and themes can be paired, one for day and one for night. So is everything around the shell — the installer, the settings app, the software repository, the backup and repair tools, the gaming session. Every project Mainstream is built with is credited in Settings → About.
- Colors from your wallpaper. Pick any wallpaper and the desktop, the settings app, your terminal, your apps — GTK and Qt alike — your folder icons and the lock screen all recolor to match it.
- A wallpaper that rotates. Point it at a folder instead of one picture and set a timer. The palette follows along with every change, so the whole desktop recolors as it goes.
- A wallpaper that changes with style. Ten ways for one picture to transition to the next: crossfade, slide, zoom, wipe, circle, ripple, peel, glitch, CRT and shatter, or let it pick at random.
- Video wallpapers. A video works as a wallpaper with nothing extra to install — it plays quietly on a loop across every screen, and the color scheme comes from it just the same.
- Themes. Your whole look — wallpaper, colors, app style, icons, interface changes, and the shape, transparency, blur, dim, borders, shadow, animations, window rules and which edge the dock sits on as well — saves under a name with a preview, and switches back in one tap.
- Take your look with you. A theme saves out to a single file you can hand to someone else, wallpaper included, with anything particular to your machine left behind.
- Day and Night. Pair two themes and let them follow the clock or your night-light schedule.
- A bar you arrange. Show, hide and reorder every piece of the bar by dragging, move them between the left, middle and right, and drop two together to join them into a single rounded group.
- A dock on any edge. Put it along the top, bottom, left or right of the screen, and the bar steps aside when you give the dock the edge it was using.
- Title bars, on or off. On for a familiar desktop, off for a clean one, switched instantly.
- Windows drawn the way you want. Corner radius, border thickness, the gaps between windows and around the screen, how see-through they are, the blur behind them, the shadow beneath them, how much the ones you are not using dim, and how they animate. Give the borders a gradient of your own or leave them following the wallpaper, and put the lot back with one press.
- App style, icons and pointer. All three are dropdowns in Settings, with pointer sizes limited to the ones your chosen pointer can actually be drawn at.
- Fonts. A searchable list that shows each font in its own lettering, and your choice carries into your apps rather than stopping at the desktop.
- A built-in window rule editor. Most desktops leave per-app rules to a config file you edit by hand. Here it is a page in Settings: teach one app where to open, whether it floats, how see-through it is, and what it is allowed to do.
- Widgets on your desktop. Eleven of them: the clock, weather, a calendar, world clocks, notes, a to do list, timers, system resources, a music visualizer, media controls and a picture of your own. Drag each one where you want it, and give them frosted glass that samples the wallpaper behind. A theme remembers which are on and where they sit. The clock gains a third style, a chunky pixel readout, alongside digital and cookie.
- A menu on the wallpaper. Right click the desktop to change the wallpaper, switch theme, and reach the bar and dock settings without opening Settings first.
- Shake to Locate. Switch it on, give the mouse a shake, and the pointer grows until you spot it.
- Gaming Mode. One keypress puts the desktop away and hands the machine to Steam's full-screen mode, the same way a Steam Deck runs, then gives the desktop back. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA alike.
- Console Mode. An install option that starts straight into the full-screen Steam session and sets up game controllers, turning a computer under the TV into a console — with the desktop still there whenever you want it.
- Windows games, ready to run. The compatibility layer that runs Windows titles is installed and switched on during setup, so your library works the first time you open it.
Twenty pages cover the whole machine, ten of which are Mainstream's own work with no equivalent in the shell it started from.
- Displays. Arrange your monitors and set resolution, refresh rate, scale, orientation, HDR and color profiles, or mirror one screen onto another.
- A layout per workspace. Four ways of arranging windows automatically plus a floating mode, and every workspace remembers its own.
- Keyboard shortcuts. A real editor rather than a printed list — change the ones that ship, add your own, and set them by pressing the keys you want.
- Type in any language. Add the keyboard layouts you write in and flip between them with a keystroke. For Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese, pick an input source and the right input method is installed and switched on for you. Installs done in those languages arrive with it already working.
- Touchpad gestures. Choose what each swipe and pinch does, applied the moment you set it.
- Manage your apps. Choose which app opens which kind of file, and what starts up when you log in, from one page.
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound, power, accounts and services, each with a proper page instead of a text file.
- A ready-made set of apps — browser, files, editor, calculator, calendar, photos, music, system monitor — each a tick-box during the install, plus a software store with pictures and descriptions for the rest.
- A launcher that finds everything. Apps, folders, files, quick sums and your clipboard history, all from one search box.
- Zoom out to the whole desktop. Flick the pointer into the corner and the desktop pulls back into a scrolling map of every workspace — drag windows between them, drop files onto them. Built on Scroll Overview by yayuuu.
- Quick settings and notifications in one panel off the side of the screen.
- Pick up where you left off. Sign out or restart and your windows reopen on the workspaces they were on. The session is written down as you work, so a crash costs you no more than a tidy sign-out would.
- Move files between your devices. Send several at once to any phone, tablet, or computer on your network running LocalSend, and receive from them the same way, with live progress and no cloud in the middle. Mainstream builds LocalSend into the desktop rather than bundling the app.
- Screen sharing and recording. Share your screen in video calls and record it on Wayland, with GPU-accelerated encoding.
- Printing that just works. Plug a printer in, or pick one up on the network, and print. No driver hunting and no unlock prompts.
- A local AI assistant. The sidebar chats with an AI that runs entirely on your machine, so nothing you type leaves it. The first message walks you through the short setup, and cloud models can be added with a key if you want them.
- Auto Mount and Uninstall Apps, two small apps for the fiddly parts: drives that are ready at every login, and removing software without breaking the desktop.
- A graphical installer. Four ways in — Default, Custom, Console Mode and OS Only.
- Dual-boot and encryption. Install alongside an existing Windows and it joins the start-up menu, or encrypt the whole system behind a passphrase. Both are set up during the install.
- Graphics sorted out for you. Your card is recognized and given drivers that match it — AMD, Intel or NVIDIA, laptops with two included — based on which model you have rather than just the brand. An experimental legacy edition covers older NVIDIA cards, back to the GeForce 400 series.
- A first-boot welcome that shows you around and offers one-click installs for the extras you want, including DaVinci Resolve and OBS for anyone making things.
- On an existing Arch install. One command turns an Arch install you already have into Mainstream OS, in about ten minutes.
- A safety net around every update. Mainstream saves a restore point before and after any change to your system software, so a bad update is one entry in the start-up menu away from being undone.
- One-click updates. System software, apps and the desktop all update together from a single button, and a marker on the bar tells you when a new release is out.
- Repair Install. One button re-runs the desktop setup and rebuilds its parts.
- Signed downloads and software. Every release is signed with checksums published alongside it, and everything Mainstream adds arrives ready-built and signed.
- A self-check after every install that writes you a health report, so a bad install tells you rather than failing quietly.
- A lean, native base. Arch underneath, native apps as the defaults, and the AUR off by default.