Get help. Protect your work. Make something.
Alongside the desktop, I’m building a family of focused tools for everyday tasks. Familiar controls for someone new to Linux, with room to go further when you’re ready.
Explore the softwareFind your feetHelp and everyday essentials
Look after your workFiles, mail and recovery
Build at your own paceProjects and practical tools
Install something useful, ask a question, keep a copy of what matters and stay in touch.
Find apps. Keep your desktop up to date.
Ecliptic’s app installer and updater is already part of the working desktop. It brings chosen apps, their installation and updates into a graphical window, alongside system updates.
Apps come from official repositories or the vendors’ own downloads. The goal is to make a useful computer easier to maintain, without asking a newcomer to start at a command prompt.
Ask for help in your own words.
The built-in assistant helps explain the desktop and find your way around Linux. Phobos is Ecliptic’s own model, fine-tuned for this help and designed to run locally on supported hardware.
Supported desktop changes are presented for review before you apply them. Local Phobos help needs no paid AI account; optional cloud services and coding agents may have their own costs.
Meet Phobos and Ecliptic AIKeep a way back to the files that matter.
A clear place to choose what to protect, where copies go and when they run. See the last successful backup, understand a failure, and browse older versions before restoring.
The backup engine and storage approach are still being chosen. The plan calls for proven open-source tools, retention controls, encryption where supported and careful restore choices. A system snapshot alone is not an independent backup.
Read, write and find your mail.
The early development app can synchronize accounts, read and search messages, write mail and keep drafts. Work is expanding into a fuller everyday mail experience, with reliability and clear permissions at its center.
It is not the default mail app yet. Broader provider testing, dependable sending, organization and daily-use polish come before that change.
See the Mail roadmapA quick look, without opening a whole project.
A focused viewer for images, PDFs and text. The plan includes zoom, image rotation, document search where supported, and useful file information, with a quick way to move between files.
Designed to fit beside the file manager and leave your originals alone.
Somewhere to put the thought before it disappears.
Plain-file Markdown notes, notebooks, tags, search and checklists. Keep everyday reminders alongside project notes, images and attachments.
Autosave and recovery are part of the plan. Any future AI help would use only the content you choose to share.
Beyond the early reader and composer, these are the main areas of planned work. Some are being developed now; this is the destination, rather than a list of finished features.
Understand your computer, work across machines and keep a project’s pieces together. Useful for developers, and there when you need them.
Find out what is slowing your computer down.
See CPU, memory, disk and network activity, grouped around the apps you recognize. GPU and video-memory readings would appear where the hardware supports them.
The aim: useful history, clear explanations and a careful way to stop an unresponsive app.
A comfortable place for commands, projects and SSH.
The initial development version has local shells, saved SSH connections, tabs, split panes and named window arrangements. Move live tabs and panes without restarting their running work.
More session tools, connection organization, snippets and tunnel controls are planned. Saved arrangements restore the layout; they do not bring a running process back after a reboot.
Move files between your computer and another one.
A visual, side-by-side local and remote file browser using SFTP over SSH. Planned features include saved connections, drag and drop, a transfer queue, progress, retries and clear overwrite choices.
Built around the same connection information as Terminal, with resume where the server and transfer support it.
See what changed before you replace it.
Compare two files, folders or configuration versions side by side. Review differences, then choose what to copy or merge.
The plan includes previews and recoverable originals, with local files first and remote comparisons later.
Put the right windows around the task at hand.
A visual way to arrange project workspaces, choose apps and window positions, and connect them to saved Terminal layouts.
This builds on Ecliptic’s existing developer desktop. The planned editor should account for missing monitors and give you an explicit choice about what to open or close.
Focused windows for the questions that usually send you hunting through commands and logs.
Make connection problems less mysterious.
Check whether a service can be reached, look up DNS, inspect routes and listening ports, and examine connection certificates. Save targets and compare results over time.
A diagnostic companion to the existing Network and Firewall settings, with support exports designed to help you remove private details before sharing.
Understand what is running in the background.
See background services, startup settings, failures and searchable logs in one place. Inspect first, then deliberately start, stop or restart a service when needed.
Start with the local computer, explain what each action affects, and request administrator approval only where required.
Let your computer handle a repeatable chore.
Create local scheduled jobs with visible commands, working folders and schedules. See the last result, review failures, run a job yourself or cancel it.
Planned around Linux user services and timers, with missed-run handling and protections against overlapping runs. Imported jobs should be reviewed before they are enabled.
Ecliptic’s working desktop has its own settings and helpers alongside the larger apps. These are also in development.
Phone linking is being explored through BlueFerry, including iPhone texts and notifications over Bluetooth. It is an integration experiment, with compatibility and scope still to establish. Optional Flatpak support and additional login methods are also future considerations.
Focused tools do not mean replacing everything. Ecliptic also chooses existing open-source apps and builds on Arch Linux and Hyprland. This page describes the project’s own software plans, not a promise that every app ships on every computer.
The Journal records development milestones as the desktop and its tools grow. Plans will become clearer through building, testing and using them.
Read the Journal Why I’m building Ecliptic