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Desktop & Daily Use

InterGenOS ships GNOME 49 on Wayland as its desktop. It is modern, fast, and built for a machine you understand, can modify, and can trust. There is no telemetry, no app-store analytics, and nothing that installs updates on its own.

This section covers what you see and use every day: the desktop environment, the applications that come installed, how you add more, the local AI assistant, and the deliberate omissions that define the system’s posture.

The desktop environment

The default desktop is GNOME 49 running on the Wayland display protocol. X11 applications run through Xwayland automatically when needed.

The visual experience is tuned for the InterGenOS look: the Papirus-Dark icon theme by default, the Bibata-Modern-Classic cursor, a system-wide prefer-dark color scheme, and Inter for UI and document typography paired with JetBrains Mono for terminal and code surfaces. A Cybernetic Blue icon theme ships as a featured alternate, selectable from Settings → Appearance.

Wayland gives each application per-window isolation: one application cannot key-log another or scrape another window’s pixels. It also handles HiDPI, variable refresh rate, mixed-DPI multi-monitor, and touch and gesture input correctly, because the protocol was designed for them.

See Graphical Session (Wayland/X11) for the full breakdown of the session, the Wayland posture, and X11 compatibility.

KDE Plasma, Xfce, and Sway as switchable desktop environments are planned and not yet shipped. The current release ships GNOME only.

What’s installed

The desktop tier provides a fully functional workstation out of the box: Firefox ESR, Files (Nautilus), GNOME Text Editor, GNOME Console, Image Viewer (Loupe), Settings, Calendar, Contacts, the Evince document viewer, and the Totem video player, alongside system utilities such as a disk usage analyzer, system monitor, and screenshot tool.

The total install spans roughly 850 packages across six build tiers (toolchain, core, base, desktop, ai, and extra). These counts drift as the system is built and rebuilt, so derive the live figures from the package set rather than relying on a fixed number.

There is no GUI app store. The software slot is served by pkm, the InterGenOS package manager, from the command line. See The Transparent Package Manager for the full command reference.

Adding more software

The binary repository carries a curated selection of optional, user-facing applications you install on demand. A developer toolchain (Git, Node.js, Go, Rust, Vim) ships by default in the core tier, and a set of modern command-line utilities (htop, rsync, bat, ripgrep, fd) ships in the base tier.

Some proprietary or distribution-restricted applications are available through download-helper packages. These do not bundle the vendor binary; they fetch it from the vendor on first install after you accept the license. The NVIDIA proprietary driver follows the same opt-in pattern under the package name nvidia, offered only on hardware where an NVIDIA GPU is present.

Multimedia and audio are covered in Multimedia & Audio; gaming and Steam in Gaming & Steam; and fonts, input, Bluetooth, and printing in Fonts, Input, Bluetooth & Printing.

Hardware acceleration

The Mesa graphics stack ships and is enabled by default for AMD (Radeon) and Intel (Arc, Iris, UHD) GPUs, covering OpenGL, Vulkan, VA-API hardware video decoding, and OpenCL compute. NVIDIA’s proprietary driver is an explicit opt-in via the nvidia package; the base distribution does not ship proprietary firmware by default. For GPU compute and AI workloads, see the GPU Compute & AI Workloads section.

The local AI assistant

InterGen is a tiered, hardware-detected, offline-first local assistant built on Qwen models, with zero telemetry. It runs on your machine, sized to your hardware.

InterGen Sentinel is a pluggable security scanner. By default it uses Local-Rules and a Local-Qwen model, entirely on-device. Six cloud providers — Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Copilot (Microsoft), ChatGPT (OpenAI), Grok (xAI), and DeepSeek — are available strictly opt-in.

When a task exceeds local capability, Phone-A-Friend (Frontier/Cloud Escalation) lets you route a single request to one of those cloud providers, on your explicit action. Nothing leaves your machine unless you send it. See The AI Assistant for the full picture.

What we don’t ship

InterGenOS makes deliberate omissions:

  • No Snap. The snapd daemon is not installed and not in the repository.
  • No Flatpak by default. It is available as an optional install if you want sandboxed third-party applications.
  • No telemetry. No component of the desktop phones home — not GNOME, not Firefox (telemetry is locked off via Mozilla policy and cannot be re-enabled by users), not the shell, not the package manager.
  • No auto-update. No background service applies updates without your explicit action.
  • No boot splash. InterGenOS shows your boot. You see the kernel hand off to systemd and every service start with its [OK] or [FAILED] marker. Spotting odd output during boot is a real practice for catching compromise or hardware change; we would rather give you that surface than hide it behind a logo.

Trust foundations

The desktop sits on a signed Secure Boot chain, dm-verity integrity over the read-only system image, and UKI signing. Updates and new software arrive through pkm and a signed package index, never through an opaque auto-updater. The system installer is Forge. For the full security story, see the Security Handbook.

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