A Wayland desktop that works like the Vivaldi browser: mouse gestures, a radial menu on a right-click hold, workspaces as vertical tabs, and per-workspace window layouts that float, tile or scroll. Vaela runs on KDE's KWin and reuses Plasma's panels, services and settings, and appears as its own Vaela session on the login screen.

• Three window layouts per workspace. Float leaves windows where you put them, Auto Tiling arranges them in a grid, and Scrollable puts them in a horizontal strip of full-height columns with the focused one in the middle of the screen. Each workspace in each activity remembers its own layout.
• Radial menu. Hold the right mouse button (half a second by default), move onto an item and let go. Applications, shell commands and desktop actions, with your own images.
• Mouse gestures. Draw with the right button to switch workspaces, close or maximize windows, open Quick Commands and more. Every stroke can be rebound.
• Workspace bar. Push the pointer against the right edge for your workspaces as tabs, with each one's layout and window count.
• Layout switch. Move the pointer to the top edge, just left of the top-right corner, to change the current workspace's layout.
• Quick Commands (F2) and Vaela Settings (Meta+Ctrl+S), with direct links to Plasma's pages for displays and HDR, sound, printers, power, keyboard, mouse, shortcuts and system information.
• Multiple monitors. Run Vaela on the primary monitor, on all of them, or on the ones you pick; the others behave like plain Plasma.
• Your own shortcuts. Every Vaela key can be changed in Settings.
• Workspace backgrounds. Give each workspace its own video or picture, with sound, scaling, speed, dim and blur options.

• Fedora 44 or 45, or a Fedora Atomic image based on them (Bazzite, Kinoite, Silverblue), x86_64.
• KWin 6.7.5, which both releases ship in their updates. Vaela's KWin plugin uses KWin's internal interfaces, so each Vaela build works only with the KWin version it was compiled against. The RPM requires that exact version; after a KWin update, rebuild Vaela.

Build the RPM (see Building) or download one from the releases page. Pick the file for your Fedora release: fc45 for Fedora 45, fc44 for Fedora 44. rpm -E %fedora prints your release. The commands below use the Fedora 45 file.

Fedora Atomic (Bazzite, Kinoite, Silverblue)

rpm-ostree install ./vaela-desktop-1.1.0-1.fc45.x86_64.rpm

Replacing an earlier local build (including the old vela-desktop package):

rpm-ostree install --uninstall vela-desktop ./vaela-desktop-1.1.0-1.fc45.x86_64.rpm

Fedora Workstation

sudo dnf install ./vaela-desktop-1.1.0-1.fc45.x86_64.rpm

Make sure your system is up to date first (rpm-ostree upgrade or sudo dnf upgrade), so it has KWin 6.7.5.

Reboot (Atomic) or log out (Workstation), then choose Vaela in the session menu of the login screen. Installing pulls in KWin and the parts of Plasma that Vaela uses; GNOME or Plasma sessions you already have stay available.

To remove it: rpm-ostree uninstall vaela-desktop, or sudo dnf remove vaela-desktop.

Move the pointer to the top edge of the screen, a little to the left of the top-right corner (which stays free for a maximized window's close button). A short coral handle there expands into the layout switch: Float, Auto Tiling or Scrollable. The magnifier opens Quick Commands and the gear opens Vaela Settings.

• Auto Tiling: drag a window edge to resize; neighbours share the new boundary.
• Scrollable: the focused column sits in the middle of the screen, so new windows open centred. Drag a column's edge to change its width; Vaela remembers each application's width for the next time it opens.
• Float: windows go back to where they were before Vaela arranged them.

Dialogs, pinned, minimized and fullscreen windows are never arranged.

Push the pointer against the right edge. Click a tab to switch, use ⋮ to rename or remove a workspace, and New workspace to add one. Hover a tab to see its window titles. The gestures → ↑ and ← ↑ send the window under the stroke to the next or previous workspace.

Hold the right mouse button still for half a second (adjustable in Vaela Settings, from 0.15 to 2 seconds) and the radial menu opens around the pointer. A quicker right-click opens the application's own context menu as usual, when you release the button.

Keep holding, move onto an item (it grows and the centre reads Release to open) and release the button. Releasing over the centre keeps the menu open so you can pick an item with a left click instead. Escape closes it. Meta+Ctrl+M opens it from the keyboard.

Hold the right button and draw. A quick right-click still opens context menus, and Shift+right-click skips Vaela entirely.

In Scrollable and Auto Tiling, Vaela's layout keys (Meta+arrows, Meta+Plus/Minus and Ctrl+Meta+arrows) take priority over Plasma's quick tiling, zoom and workspace keys that use the same combinations.

Every key in the table can be changed under Keyboard shortcuts in Vaela Settings: click a shortcut and press the new keys (Esc cancels, Backspace removes it). If another application or Vaela action already uses them, Vaela says which and asks before taking them over; the arrow button next to a changed shortcut puts the default back. The global ones also show up in Plasma's shortcut settings under Vaela.

By default Vaela runs on the primary monitor, the one with priority 1 in System Settings → Display & Monitor, and moves with it when you change which one that is. Under Monitors in Vaela Settings you can pick All monitors or Chosen monitors and switch each one on or off.

On each of those monitors you get the layout switch, the workspace bar, mouse gestures and the radial menu, and windows follow the workspace's layout. On the others windows float and right-click works as in plain Plasma. Quick Commands and Settings open on the monitor you are using, if Vaela runs there.

Each workspace can have its own video or picture as its background. Choose one under Backgrounds in Vaela Settings, or from a workspace's ⋯ menu in the workspace bar (Background…). The copy button uses a background for every workspace, and the bin removes it. Switching workspaces crossfades between them, and a video carries on where it left off when you come back.

Workspaces without a background keep your Plasma wallpaper. While any workspace has one, Plasma's desktops use the Vaela Workspace Backgrounds wallpaper, which shows your old picture on the others (change it in Plasma's Configure Desktop and Wallpaper). Once you remove the last background, your previous wallpaper comes back. Backgrounds appear on the monitors Vaela runs on.

Click a workspace in the list to change its options; Use on every workspace copies them to the others.

Videos play through Qt Multimedia and FFmpeg, with hardware decoding where the graphics driver offers it. WebM (VP9, AV1) plays everywhere. MP4 (H.264, HEVC) needs a full FFmpeg build, which Bazzite ships and Fedora gets from RPM Fusion (ffmpeg-libs); pictures can be PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL, SVG, BMP or an animated GIF. A file that will not play shows the Plasma wallpaper instead.

Backgrounds can also be set from a script:

qdbus-qt6 org.vaela.Shell /Shell setBackground 2 file:///home/you/Videos/rain.webm

Open Vaela Settings (Meta+Ctrl+S, the gear in the layout switch, or the radial menu) to set the gap between windows, choose workspace backgrounds, turn gestures on or off, change the stroke length and the radial menu's hold time, rebind every gesture and keyboard shortcut, and choose the monitors Vaela runs on.

Customize radial menu… edits the radial menu:

• Add Application lists installed applications; the name and icon are filled in.
• Add Command runs any shell command, optionally in a terminal.
• Edit changes the name, command or image. Pick a system icon or your own PNG, JPEG, SVG, WebP or BMP; Vaela copies it into ~/.local/share/vaela-shell/radial-icons/.
• The arrows reorder items and the bin removes one. Menus with more than eight items get extra pages.

Settings, gesture bindings, layout keys, workspace backgrounds, the radial menu and remembered column widths live in ~/.config/vaelarc; the global shortcuts live with Plasma's, in ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc.

Everything builds in a Fedora distrobox: vela-dev for Fedora 45, with its home in .devbox/home inside the checkout. Prefix any script with FEDORA=44 to use a Fedora 44 container (vela-dev-f44, .devbox/home-f44) and build Fedora 44 RPMs instead.

./scripts/dev-container.sh

FEDORA=44 ./scripts/dev-container.sh

Build the RPM into rpms/:

./scripts/build-rpm.sh

Run Vaela in a window on your current desktop, with a throwaway home:

./scripts/run-nested.sh --fresh

Run the tests, including a private software-rendered KWin session:

./scripts/test-headless.sh

• Each build is tied to one KWin version and has to be rebuilt after KWin updates.
• The workspace bar shows window titles; live thumbnails and workspace stacks are not done yet.

Vaela is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version (LICENSES/GPL-2.0-or-later.txt). The KWin plugin is built against KWin's own GPL-2.0-or-later code, so Vaela must be distributed under a GPL-compatible licence; GPL-2.0-or-later matches KWin and keeps Vaela compatible with Qt's LGPL-3.0. Licensing follows the REUSE conventions: source files carry SPDX headers and REUSE.toml covers the rest.

Vaela is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Vivaldi Technologies, KDE e.V. or Universal Blue. Vivaldi, KDE and Plasma are trademarks of their respective owners.

• KDE Plasma and KWin, which Vaela builds on.
• Vivaldi, whose gestures and tab bar inspired the design.
• Kando, whose menu editor inspired the radial menu editor.