Software that's on your side.
A desktop, a web browser and a night sky for Linux, made to give people back their attention, their evenings and the hours a screen was quietly taking. Free and open source.
Written by AI. Directed by Peter Walker.
You open the laptop to check one thing. You look up and an hour has gone, and whatever you sat down to do is still waiting.
That isn't a lack of willpower. Feeds, notifications and autoplay are designed, tested and tuned by very large teams to hold on to you, because your attention is what they sell. Every other piece of software on your computer treats that hour exactly like an hour spent learning, making something, or talking to someone you love.
How long, on average, people stayed on one screen before switching, in workplace studies since 2016. In 2003 it was about two and a half minutes.
Gloria Mark, Attention Span, 2023Interrupted people make up the time by working faster, and pay for it in stress, frustration and time pressure.
Mark, Gudith & Klocke, CHI 2008In February 2026 the European Commission's preliminary view was that TikTok's infinite scroll, autoplay and push notifications breach EU law.
European Commission, 6 Feb 2026Software should be judged by how well you live when you're not using it.
So we're building the other kind: three free apps that guard your attention while you work, tell you the truth about your time online, and, when the day is done, send you outside.
A whole Linux desktop, keyboard-first, where nothing interrupts you while you're typing.
A quiet browser whose small companion brightens when you learn or make something, and grows sleepy in an endless feed.
A few quiet minutes under tonight's real sky, and then it suggests you go and look at the real stars, or go to bed.
Your apps open where you left them yesterday, and every window is a keystroke away.
Three messages arrive while you're typing. Nothing pops up until you pause.
Deep in a feed, the little flame in the corner grows sleepy. Nothing stops you; you just see it.
A new tab opens on a garden. A day of learning grew ferns.
Under tonight's real sky you write down what's on your mind, and it becomes a star low in the west.
A few slow breaths, the screen dims, and the last line points outside: Saturn is up in the south-east.
A keyboard-first desktop for Linux, in one download that installs beside the one you have.
It holds your notifications until you pause, shows you what's going on without asking for a look, and measures nothing about you. Good-looking enough that you want to sit down at it; quiet enough that you get lost in the work rather than the machine.
A workshop, not a slot machine.
You know the moment: halfway through a thought, something pops up, and the thought is gone. Slipstream can tell that you're typing, never what, and keeps that moment yours.
Put a window away and it pours down the side of the screen as a stream of light, still running.
A busy app pours fast and bright; a quiet one sends a few slow grey streaks. A download finishing catches your eye without you going to look.
Rest the pointer on a stream to see what it's using right now. Click it to bring the window back.
No telemetry, ever. What you do on your computer stays on your computer. It never checks for updates by itself.
No AI features, ever, and nothing built to keep you looking for longer than you meant to.
One shortcut tips the whole desktop back. Press a letter and you land on that window.
15% of 80 or 5 km in miles.There are twenty wallpapers, and most aren't animations at all: they're worked out live as you watch, so they never run quite the same way twice. Whichever you choose runs behind your windows all along, and takes the screen when you step away. Every effect has a reduced-motion version, switched live from Settings.
Little apps, your own or other people's, each add a card to a panel that drops from the bar. Anything that prints a line of JSON can be one.
Nothing runs until you've looked. Each plugin runs in a sandbox that reaches only what it lists, and Settings says in plain words what that is before you turn it on. If its files change later, it switches itself off until you've looked again.
Your colours, everywhere. Pick one of ten sets of three colours that go together, and the whole desktop follows, Settings included.
One command downloads the newest release, checks its published checksum and signature, and says what it will do before it writes anything. Then log out and choose Slipstream on the login screen. Add -- --try to open it in a window first, installing nothing.
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peterwalker78/slipstream-desktop/main/install.sh)"
x86_64 Linux with Debian 13's libraries or newer. github.com/peterwalker78/slipstream-desktop
The web browser that's on your side. Probably the only browser that's happiest when you're not using it.
A small, glowing flame with a face lives in the corner of the toolbar. It's yours, and it reflects the quality of your time online the way the sky reflects the weather.
Somewhere that restores you and it brightens and lets off little motes of light. Sink into an endless feed and it clouds over, grows tired and drifts to the edge of its nook, as if it's ready to go outside and hoping you'll come too. It never scolds you.
Brightrested and ready
Happysomewhere that restores you
Cloudeda long scroll is weighing on it
Sleepytime for a breather
Dozingyou're away, and it's resting too
Winding downlate at night, with you
Every new tab opens on a calm page made on your computer. A quiet day brings moss, a day of learning ferns, a calm night fireflies. Nothing ever wilts, and missing a day costs nothing. Instead of the sites you visit most, it suggests somewhere worth going: over 300 researched corners of the web, from live nature cams and free books to museums and gentle puzzles.
Click the wisp for how today has felt, the shape of your week, and which places restored you or wore you down. No minutes, scores or percentages anywhere: just the pattern, and the kind of mirror that makes the next choice easier. Oh, Thursday evenings are always like that.
Install the Flatpak, make it your default browser, and use the web as you normally would. There's nothing to set up.
curl -LO https://github.com/peterwalker78/glimmerwood/releases/latest/download/glimmerwood-x86_64.flatpak flatpak install --user glimmerwood-x86_64.flatpak
x86_64 Linux, with Flathub for the GNOME runtime. On a phone: the garden on the web. github.com/peterwalker78/glimmerwood
The end of the day
Going west, as the Sun and stars do when they go down.
Tonight's real sky, and then the real sky outside.
A small stargazing game that is designed to let you go. A few quiet minutes at the end of the day to come back to what matters: the people who are there for you, something to look forward to, and setting down what's weighing on you so it's lighter in the morning.
It draws the sky over you right now, in fine dots: the real stars, the Moon at its real phase, the planets that are really up. The wisp from Glimmerwood is out for the night, on a tuft of moss on the horizon.
Anything heavy tonight? Write it in a few words and it becomes a warm star hung low in the west. Only you will ever see it.
Tonight's list with the wisp: planets, clusters and galaxies to find, a story told a card at a time, and now and then a small question about your life.
The sky on your own. Zoom in and a real photograph from Hubble, Webb or a ground telescope takes over from the dots.
A few slow breaths with the wisp, in for four and out for six. The screen dims, and you watch what you set down sink behind the horizon.
Most apps are built to keep you. This one is built to let you go, and says so, so there's no trick in it.
“If it's clear: Saturn is up in the south-east, a steady light that doesn't twinkle. Give your eyes twenty minutes.”The last line. Then the window closes itself.
A logbook of plain files. A page for each night with a small chart of that evening's sky. Any worry can have a plan charted for it, only if you ask: a wish, the best of it, what gets in the way, and an if-then plan.
Open it at the end of the day. The first night, the wisp shows you around.
curl -LO https://github.com/peterwalker78/westering/releases/latest/download/westering-x86_64.flatpak flatpak install --user westering-x86_64.flatpak
x86_64 Linux, with Flathub for the GNOME runtime. github.com/peterwalker78/westering
All of the code in Slipstream, Glimmerwood and Westering is written by AI: Claude, made by Anthropic. We say so plainly, because it matters how software you trust was made.
What the AI can't do is decide what the apps are for, judge how they feel, notice where they fall short, or know when they really work. That came from Peter Walker, who set the vision, made the calls, and has used all three every day since the first build, catching what no test would.
None of the apps has AI features, and none ever will.
Counted from the AI's own session transcripts for all three apps and the agent-notify plugin, 14 September to 23 October 2026. These are minimums: the transcripts miss the first week of building, and planning done in chat. Between them, the three repositories hold 790 commits on their main branches.
He picked a design from the AI's mockups; the first build looked like the window being chopped into strips. About eight rounds of his direction later (close downwards, more transparency, eat the window while pushing it), it was right.
The AI's first two answers to “what about down-time?” missed what he meant. He steered it to a separate app that quietly helps you switch off, then set what was in it: reflective questions, people and plans, no AI.
Over one evening the AI said a feature worked again and again. Each time he watched a real run, it didn't. It took a redesign he pushed for, not another patch.
None of this is new science. It's well-studied psychology, applied by software that has nothing to gain from your time.
Where the evidence is modest, we say so: nobody has shown that stargazing itself improves sleep. The claim is only that a little dark and a big sky beat another half hour of screen.
| What research found | What we built | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Interruptions cost more than time. People make up for them by rushing, at the price of stress and frustration.Mark, Gudith & Klocke, 2008 | Notifications wait for a pause in your typing, then arrive as one card. | Slipstream |
| Calm technology informs at the edge of attention instead of demanding the centre of it.Weiser & Brown, 1995 | Streams show what an app is doing from the corner of your eye; the wisp sits quietly in a corner. | Both |
| Flow, deep absorption in a task that stretches you, is among the most satisfying states people report.Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 | A keyboard-first desktop where every window is one key away, and nothing pulls you out. | Slipstream |
| Noticing changes behaviour. Students who only kept track of their social media use came out less anxious.Hunt and others, 2018 | The wisp notices for you, so you see the pattern and the choice stays yours. | Glimmerwood |
| Shame makes people hide from a problem; guilt about a specific act makes them repair it.Tangney & Dearing, 2002 | Nothing scolds. At its heaviest the wisp looks sleepy, never sad, and nothing is ever blocked. | Glimmerwood |
| Bright screens in the evening delay the body's sleep hormone and push sleep later.Chang and others, 2015 | Night light follows the real sun; the wisp winds down after eleven; Westering dims before the end. | All three |
| Gratitude lifts mood. People who wrote weekly about what they were grateful for felt better about their lives.Emmons & McCullough, 2003 | Small questions about the people who are there for you, without ever naming gratitude. | Westering |
| If-then plans markedly raise the odds of following through on a goal.Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006 | A plan charted for a worry: a wish, the best of it, what's in the way, and what you'll do if it happens. | Westering |
| Slow breathing, under ten breaths a minute, goes with calm and less anxiety.Zaccaro and others, 2018 | The wisp breathes with you, in for four and out for six, and its own breath slows through the evening. | Westering |
| Awe, at something vast, goes with less stress and less dwelling on oneself.Piff and others, 2015; Anderson, Monroy & Keltner, 2018 | The last line names something real to look at in tonight's sky, outside. | Westering |
Three native Linux apps written in Rust, each its own open-source project, each standing on its own. They share an aim and a look, and no code dependencies in either direction. Every change is built and tested in CI.
--uninstall removes exactly what it wrote.Not yet: ARM machines, Ubuntu 24.04 and the distributions built on it, and Slipstream with NVIDIA's driver, which hasn't been tried. Glimmerwood is Linux only.
Free software: all three are GPL-3.0-or-later, for x86_64 Linux, on GitHub under peterwalker78. Issues and pull requests are welcome.
Software that notices how your time feels has to be trustworthy, so these aren't settings. They're how the apps are built.
No telemetry, accounts or cloud. Westering can't even reach the network.
No streaks, scores or badges. Missing a day costs you nothing.
Nothing scolds or nags, no page is blocked, and every choice stays yours.
The code is written by AI; the apps contain none. Software that does what it says.
Nothing is designed to keep you looking for longer than you meant to.
Read every line, build it yourself, and keep it for ever.
Other builders can join us if their apps keep the same promises: read the code for allies.
Windows 10 support ends, leaving millions of working computers looking for somewhere to go.
Australia's minimum age of 16 for social media accounts comes into force.
The European Commission's preliminary findings say TikTok's addictive design breaches the Digital Services Act.
Linux passes 5% of Steam's hardware survey for the first time.
Regulators are naming addictive design, and more people than ever are arriving on Linux. They deserve software that's on their side.
All three apps exist, run every day, and are free for anyone to use. What comes next is about reaching the people they're for.
Try Slipstream in a window on the desktop you have now, installing nothing, by adding -- --try to the install command.
Write a plugin, propose a site for the right list, test on hardware we haven't reached, or open an issue. Every report makes the apps better for everyone.
If you believe technology should be judged by how well people live when they put it down, we'd like to talk about taking this further, together.
Open an issue or a discussion on any of the three repositories on GitHub, under peterwalker78.