The Nourish guide

Installing Nourish

What you need

Nourish ships today as a prebuilt package for Fedora 44 — a free, popular, beginner-friendly version of Linux. If your computer runs Windows or macOS, you'd install Fedora alongside it or on a spare machine first. You'll also want a reasonably modern graphics card (NVIDIA, Intel, or AMD). Don't want to commit your whole machine yet? You can run Nourish in a window inside your existing Linux desktop to try it.

The one-command install

Open the Terminal app and paste this. It downloads the prebuilt release, unpacks it, and launches a friendly interactive installer — it only pulls the runtime libraries Nourish needs (no developer toolchain), and it's safe to re-run.

Copycurl -fsSL https://nourish.snowies.com/release/latest/fedora44/package.tar.gz | tar -xz && y5-install/install.sh

Want to see exactly what it would do, changing nothing?

Copycurl -fsSL https://nourish.snowies.com/release/latest/fedora44/package.tar.gz | tar -xz && y5-install/install.sh --dry-run

The installer detects your graphics card and pre-selects the right driver, installs the runtime packages with your permission (it uses sudo for the system steps), and sets up the login session entries. You can also optionally install the MX Master gesture daemon, the developer log-viewer, and the lock-screen policy.

From source (for the curious)

The full source lives on GitHub. Nourish is a set of independent Cargo workspaces rather than one — there's no top-level Cargo.toml — and the build goes through the helper scripts under environment/:

Copygit clone https://github.com/y5-snowies/nourish
cd nourish
# Build + run the compositor (debug) via the helper script:
environment.container/run.sh debug

Building from source needs the Rust toolchain plus the system development packages (Wayland, libinput, Mesa/Vulkan, ffmpeg, …). The repository's ci/ and environment/ folders list everything, and the prebuilt install above needs none of it.

Starting Nourish

Log out, and on your login screen pick a "Y5…" session from the session menu (usually a small gear icon). Log back in — and you're home.

Stuck? Open an issue on GitHub or say hello on Discord and a human will help.

One endless canvas

In Nourish, your screen isn't the whole desktop — it's a window onto a much bigger one. Every app lives somewhere on a single endless canvas, and you pan around it the way you'd look around a real desk. New windows open centred on wherever you're looking, and they stay put until you move them; nothing ever auto-rearranges behind your back.

To pan: hold Super+Ctrl+Alt and drag, or use an MX Master gesture (see below). To move a window: hold Super and drag it. To resize one: hold Super+Shift and drag.

Pin-sharp zoom

Scroll the wheel to zoom — the point under your cursor stays put, so you zoom toward whatever you're looking at. Zoom out for the big picture or dive into a single window, and everything stays crisp while you do it, video included. Press Super+F at any time to frame all your windows at once.

Groups

Select a few windows (hold Super+Alt and drag a box around them), then press Super+G to group them. Windows in a group can be aligned (left, centre, right, top, bottom), distributed evenly, and stacked — design-tool tidiness in one move. A window can go fullscreen within its group, and a whole group can collapse down to just its name: hidden but never lost. Use Super+Alt+G to add the current window to an existing group.

Restoring windows

When a window closes — or its app crashes — Nourish leaves a placeholder of the same size in the same spot, remembering how the app was launched. Tap it and the window comes back exactly where it was. Many apps pick up their own last state on their own: a terminal returns to its last folder, a browser to its open tabs.

Better still, your whole layout is saved to disk (under your user state folder), so it survives a logout, a crash, or a full reboot — not just an app closing. Log back in and your canvas is waiting, windows and placeholders where you left them.

Worlds

One endless canvas is usually enough — but sometimes you want a clean one. Press Super+K and a gentle 3D picker rises up, each of your canvases shown as a tile. Use the arrow keys (or the mouse) to pick one and press Enter to fly into it; Esc (or Super+K again) backs out without switching.

Each world is a complete, separate canvas with its own windows — keep "work" and "play" apart, or give a project its own space. Worlds remember themselves between sessions, just like everything else. (They're a bit like virtual desktops, but spatial: you fly between whole canvases rather than flipping a switch.)

Zones

Zones are saved spots on your canvas you can jump to instantly — a writing corner, a project table, a reading nook. Press F1–F6 to recall a saved spot, and Shift+F1–F6 to save your current view into that slot. Six favourite places, each one key away from wherever you are.

Navigation

Move focus to the next window in any direction with a single keystroke, and the view smoothly glides and settles on it — no hunting, no reaching for the mouse.

Capture

Press Super+S to open the capture setup overlay. Nourish can capture four ways:

• One or more windows — pick them on the canvas; the capture tracks them live.
• A region of the canvas — draw a box in the world; it follows your pan and zoom.
• A region of the screen — a fixed rectangle of pixels.
• The whole screen.

Save a crisp PNG screenshot, or record a smooth hardware-encoded H.264 video (using your GPU's NVENC on NVIDIA, or VAAPI on AMD/Intel). There's a transparent-background toggle too — turn the wallpaper off and capture just your windows over nothing, perfect for overlays. Screenshots go to your Pictures folder, or you can pick a location with the standard Save dialog.

Sharing your screen live into another app (Zoom, the browser, OBS) isn't wired up yet — that's a separate Wayland protocol still on the list. Nourish's own recorder works today.

The launcher

Press Super+N to open the built-in application launcher, find your app by typing, and start it from the keyboard — the new window opens centred on your current view.

Shortcuts that just work

Nourish ships with a small, carefully chosen set of shortcuts that covers everything — moving, zooming, grouping, jumping — designed to be comfortable for long days. Here's the whole set; it fits on one page.

Mouse "tools" come from holding a modifier while you drag: Super moves a window, Super+Shift scales it, Super+Ctrl+Alt pans the canvas, Super+Alt box-selects windows. The media keys on your keyboard (volume, play/pause, next/previous) work as you'd expect.

When you run Nourish in a window inside another desktop (the "try it safely" mode), Super becomes Ctrl so it doesn't clash with your host. Shortcuts aren't user-editable yet — that's on the roadmap.

MX Master gestures

If you use a Logitech MX Master mouse, its gesture button becomes a compass: hold it and flick in any direction to glide that way across the canvas. The installer can set up the small background helper that makes this work (along with the udev rule it needs); after that there's nothing to configure.

The lock screen

Press Super+L to lock. Your session is held safely behind a real password prompt (checked the proper way, through your system's PAM login) until you type your password. And there's a little surprise we'd rather you discover than read about — so lock your screen and see.

A living backdrop

Behind your windows sits a gentle parallax scene — not a flat wallpaper, but a soft 3D backdrop that drifts as you pan and zoom around the canvas, giving you a quiet sense of place and motion. It's drawn by its own little graphics engine and stays well out of your way.

Multiple screens

Today Nourish drives a single monitor. Multi-display support — each screen its own view onto the canvas — is planned but not wired up yet, so for now a second monitor won't light up. If you're trying Nourish in a window inside another desktop, that window is your one screen.

The graphics engine

Nourish draws your desktop on the GPU. It has two graphics backends — Vulkan (the modern technology behind today's games) and GLES (a well-established, broadly compatible one) — and it's built to use the best one your machine supports, falling back automatically so the canvas works as widely as possible.

An honest note for the technically minded: on real hardware (a full login session, not the try-it-in-a-window mode), GLES is the path that's fully wired to the screen today; the Vulkan scan-out path is still being finished. Both run in the windowed/nested mode. You pick your preference in the settings file (below).

Any graphics card

Nourish works with NVIDIA cards as well as Intel and AMD graphics (through the Mesa drivers that come with Linux). The installer detects which one you have and pulls the matching driver for you. Video recording uses your card's hardware encoder — NVENC on NVIDIA, VAAPI on AMD and Intel.

Built on Wayland

Nourish is built natively on Wayland — the modern standard for how Linux draws to your screen — rather than translating from older technology. That's part of why it feels smooth and stays secure, and it means Wayland-native apps run as first-class citizens. For the technically curious, here's a sample of what it speaks:

Older (X11) apps

Some apps haven't moved to Wayland yet. A built-in compatibility layer for those (XWayland) isn't included yet, so a handful of X11-only apps won't open for now. It's on the roadmap; most modern apps are already Wayland-native and run fine today.

Light on resources

Nourish leans on your graphics chip to do the heavy lifting, so the canvas stays fluid even with a lot of windows open. It's young software, so it's still being tuned — but the architecture is built for a calm, steady frame rate rather than flashy effects.

Make it yours

All of Nourish's settings live in one readable file at ~/.config/y5.compositor/settings.json. There's also a small interactive settings editor you can run to change them with a friendly menu instead of editing by hand. Here's what the file looks like:

Copy{
  "renderer": "vulkan",          // "vulkan" or "gles"
  "renderer_fallback": true,     // fall back to GLES if Vulkan can't start
  "renderer_sync": "",           // "", "infence", or "kms" frame sync
  "hdr": false,                  // HDR output (Vulkan only)
  "depth": 10,                   // colour depth: 8 (SDR) or 10 (deep colour)
  "vrr": true,                   // variable refresh rate (adaptive sync)
  "render_node": "/dev/dri/renderD128",
  "desktop_name": "Y5Compositor",
  "log_level": "info,warn,error",
  "capture_encoder": ""          // "" = auto (NVENC), or "vaapi" for AMD/Intel
}

Settings are read once when Nourish starts, so save the file and start a fresh session to apply changes (live reload isn't in yet). The installer writes a sensible default for you during setup.

Free & open source

Nourish is free to use, share, and study. The complete source code lives on GitHub, where you can report problems, suggest ideas, or contribute. It's dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0 — the standard, permissive pair used across the Rust ecosystem — so you can use it under whichever of the two suits you. No account, no ads, no strings.