Quickshell – building blocks for your desktop
23 comments
·August 5, 20250x696C6961
I really think that everyone is sleeping on QML.
actinium226
Looks nice!
zekenie
Neat! What OSes does this support?
RGBCube
Currently Linux and I think BSD, and the creator has said he wants to support MacOS and Windows, though those will only be included in the paid product.
On Linux and BSD, it supports Wayland and X11, though Wayland is better supported.
ie, Quickshell will forever stay completely free for free operating sysems.
oblio
Weirdly, the fact that the Windows and MacOS versions will be paid makes me more optimistic.
Customizing at least the Windows window manager isn't for the faint of heart and its architecture doesn't have a lot in common with Linux so such an effort is very far from a straightforward port, and as a result most Linux desktop software and especially stuff that deeply integrates with the desktop environment is basically never ported or the port is incomplete, buggy, short lived, etc.
KDE4 was supposed to fully support Windows and 15+ years later I'm fairly sure that dream is dead.
burnt-resistor
[flagged]
treetalker
To be fair, I think that's just the background on one of the highlighted user creations that the website is showcasing.
burnt-resistor
[flagged]
jdiff
I'm no fan of 3000 year old vampire dragons, but this is not a 3000 year old vampire dragon. The whole of Japanese animation should not be reduced down to 3000 year old vampire dragons.
Valodim
similar to how counter strike celebrates gun violence, right?
mmh0000
[flagged]
jdiff
Interesting that the video being used as a showcase is dropping so many frames. Is QuickShell particularly heavy, the system recording particularly anemic, or something else? For the first half of the video I didn't realize QuickShell supported transitions at all and thought it only had hard cuts between different states. It looks like a very interesting project though and a worthy time sink, especially with those transitions being supported.
jmrm
I can also watch it totally fine in a cheap recent Android phone at Firefox
egypturnash
It’s something else, in your connection or your computer. The video plays fine on the old iPad mini I’m using right now and shows transitions from the very first action.
lucideer
fwiw in Firefox on my old Android phone I saw the same choppiness watching it in page but downloading & watching it locally it was smooth.
On very fast WiFi & the video is only 2MB so I can only presume something in the page is competing for device perf.
zahlman
The page actually crashed my computer the first time. ("Why did you try again?" I've had the same issue with a couple of other specific things — most notably the clipping interface on Twitch, which causes it reliably — and I'm trying to figure out an ultimate cause; but I really don't know what I'm doing there.)
LoganDark
The video is 125fps (according to ffprobe) and appears smooth on my 120Hz display, so maybe you're the one dropping frames.
dietr1ch
Yeah, it's outstandingly smooth for a web video.
zamadatix
125 fps should actually be a huge red flag, not that the video FPS is the be-all-end-all of what the render FPS actually was anyways, as that's extremely unlikely to be their refresh rate. Since the other video has a different (but equally odd) refresh rate, we know it isn't which also means we know there would at least be judder.
This all strongly hints to the videos being variable frame rate encoded. A quick dump of the timestamps with ffprobe and then a quick transform to the deltas seems to agree with this https://pastebin.com/raw/PbbNGBVy
The most common frametime is 0.006945, which aligns with a 144 Hz target refresh rate. This makes sense as 144 Hz makes perfect sense as their monitor's refresh rate. Ignoring timestamp rounding differences, these are the inconsistent frametime buckets:
0.006945, 0.01389, 0.020836, 0.027782, 0.034726, 0.041672, 0.048617, 0.062508, 0.076399, 0.097235, 0.10418, 0.118071, 0.145852, 0.166689, 0.229196, 0.256978, 0.29865, 0.354213, 0.395886, 0.513957, 0.770935
VFR video is relatively uncommon as well, so I wonder if that's why people are reporting so many performance issues viewing the video with different setups. I.e. between all of the reports of stuttering, it's probably both the video itself and the devices trying to play the oddly encoded video.
To stay in loop with updates:
Couldn't find the releases-only feed in Forgejo RSS, the blog seemed to be outdated and who doesn't use X or discord, here is at least a github-mirror where you can subscribe to releases:
https://github.com/quickshell-mirror/quickshell