Just enough window manager.
A simple, powerful, modern Linux window manager, built INTO the machine from the ground up. One small program draws everything on the screen: the bar, the menus, the windows, your machines and the lock.
It is the desktop of both appliances: what you see on a vmx, where your machines are the desktops, and on a zxp, where your pools are. Written in Rust for Wayland, and better with every release.
01 · tinyOne 20 MB programThe compositor, the bar, the menus, every window, the fly-through, the lock and screensaver, and a VNC server: one program, with no X11 and no desktop environment under it.
02 · woven inYour machines are its windowsEach machine fills the screen at its own resolution, with your keys going straight to it, and a Linux machine hands its frames over on the GPU. No viewer window, no web console.
03 · modernRust and WaylandMemory-safe code, drawn by the GPU, on the display system Linux is moving to. It talks to the graphics card and the input devices directly.
What is a compositor?
Every program on a Linux desktop draws its own window, into a piece of memory of its own. Something has to decide where each one goes, which is in front and which one your keys and mouse belong to, and then put them all together into the one picture your monitor shows. That something is the compositor.
On the old X11 desktop the job was split three ways: an X server, a window manager and a compositor, each its own program. On Wayland, the modern way, it is one program. jewm is that program.
How it works
jewm starts as the machine boots and owns the screen from then on. It drives the graphics card and the monitor through the kernel directly, reads keys, the mouse and touch the same way, and draws every frame with the GPU.
Everything on the screen, one program
jewm is one program of 20 MB. A whole desktop environment is a stack of programs and services to install and patch; jewm comes inside the appliance's signed system image, is upgraded with it, and goes back with it if an upgrade is undone.
It knows the machine it runs on
A general desktop runs your programs and leaves the rest to others: a viewer in a window for each virtual machine, a web page for the host. jewm is part of the appliance, so the machines, the pools and the system itself are on the screen as they are.
Everything a key away
The bar carries a menu for each part of the machine, each with a letter lit: Super and that letter opens it. On the right, the host's name, the time and the ten desktops, each with its machine's name: a map of where everything is. Over a machine the bar hides until the pointer touches the top edge.
The machine's menu, and yours
Over a machine, a right click is the machine's own: its desktop's menu, as if you sat at it. Hold Super and the right click is jewm's: everything you can do to that machine, without leaving it. Start, suspend, shut down, reboot, force off, snapshot, put it on a desktop, pin it, bring it back with the host or remove it. Both menus can be open at once, one for the machine and one for what runs it.
Fly through, or see them all
Tap Super and every machine is a card with its name, CPUs, memory, state and its screen, live: up and down to fly, Enter to go in. Tab lays them out as a wall, every screen at once. Tag several with Ctrl+Space and act on all of them together. This website flies the way the desktop does.
Windows, its own and yours
jewm's own windows, the forms, the boards and the reports, open centred, keep their size and say what went wrong in words. Programs' windows are framed the same way. Drag a title to move, an edge to size, Ctrl+Shift with an arrow to tile to a half or to maximise, and Alt+Tab reaches every window and machine, minimised ones too.
A lock worth looking at
Super+l locks the screen behind a scene drawn by the GPU: up to twelve layers of nebulae, stars, galaxies, planets, a black hole that bends the light of every layer under it, warps, tunnels, comets, skies, ridges and skylines, or GLSL of your own. Nine presets to start from; the Screensaver window changes any of them and previews it over the whole screen. The password is the console user's, checked through PAM, and wrong guesses wait longer each time.
Your keys, any keyboard
Super+/ puts every key on the screen. Keys go by their place on the keyboard, so the same chords work on QWERTZ, AZERTY or Cyrillic, and System > Keyboard changes any of them. Focus follows a click or the pointer, as you like. On a touch screen a tap is a click, a long press opens the menu of what is under your finger, and a swipe moves along the walls.
The whole screen, anywhere
jewm serves the whole screen itself, the bar, menus, windows and machines with the keys and the pointer. On an appliance it listens on the machine alone, and xrdp offers the same screen as RDP, so any remote desktop client reaches it. The lock is what asks for the password, there as on the monitor.
Still improving
jewm is young: it first shipped with the first vmx images, in October 2026, and it changes with every release, which reaches it as the whole system does, signed and with a way back. What it does not do yet, said plainly:
It comes with the appliance
jewm is not installed on its own: it is the screen of vmx and zxp, in their signed system images. Get the appliance, and it is what you see.