MiDesktop

MiDesktop (formerly MiDE) is a fork of KDE version 1, fixed for modern Linux systems. It’s been ported to the Osiris toolkit, itself a fork of Qt 2.

It’s clean, unassuming, and stupidly fast and lightweight.

MiDesktop is under development, however, to celebrate the New Year, a Development Preview release has been made! You can get packages for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04, or you can also compile from source if your distribution doesn’t have a package. Please note that these are development preview packages, and as such are likely to contain bugs. Please report bugs that you find so we can make it even better.

Installing packages for Linux

Packages for Debian and Ubuntu are available for the amd64 architecture.

Important: If you have previously compiled and installed Osiris and/or MiDesktop, you must completely remove those installations prior to using these packages.

If you have not already, you will need to add the Libranext Pub-Package repository to get the required Osiris toolkit.

For Ubuntu:
Substitute <your distribution here> with your release codename: for Ubuntu, noble is the currently supported release.

sudo echo 'deb https://debpkg.libranext.com/pub/ubuntu <your distribution here> main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libranext-pub.list
wget https://debpkg.libranext.com/pub/ubuntu/pool/main/libranext-debpkg-keyring_2025_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i libranext-debpkg-keyring_2025_all.deb
sudo apt update

For Debian:
Substitute <your distribution here> with your release codename: for Debian, trixie is the currently supported release. As root, run these commands:

echo 'deb https://debpkg.libranext.com/pub/debian <your distribution here> main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libranext-pub.list
wget https://debpkg.libranext.com/pub/debian/pool/main/libranext-debpkg-keyring_2025_all.deb
dpkg -i libranext-debpkg-keyring_2025_all.deb
apt update

Now you can add the development preview repository.

For Ubuntu:
Substitute <your distribution here> with your release codename: for Ubuntu, noble is the currently supported release.

sudo echo "'deb https://debpkg.libranext.com/pub/ubuntu-preview <your distribution here> main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libranext-preview.list"
sudo apt update
sudo apt install midesktopbase midesktoplibs midesktopwallpapers midesktopbase-doc midesktoplibs-doc midesktopbase-i18n

For Debian:
Substitute <your distribution here> with your release codename: for Debian, trixie is the currently supported release. As root, run these commands:

echo 'deb https://debpkg.libranext.com/pub/debian-preview <your distribution here> main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libranext-preview.list
apt update
apt install midesktopbase midesktoplibs midesktopwallpapers midesktopbase-doc midesktoplibs-doc midesktopbase-i18n

For all distributions:
After installing the packages in the previous steps, it is strongly recommended that you reboot your computer. Then, at your next login, you can choose the MiDesktop session and log in. Have fun!

Screenshots