Starling released version 0.5.0 on September 20, 2026, adding an optional, walkable 3D waterfront city alongside its conventional 2D desktop. The city is a workspace: applications remain real windows, and Starling also supports running the desktop through Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2).
A waterfront city with real app windows
Starling’s 3D Desktop mode places a tiled plaza, buildings and waterfront scenery around application windows. Chrome, Files, Terminal, Video Player and other apps appear as working windows within the scene—not as static pictures.
You can switch apps with Alt + Tab or bring one forward from a live-preview rail. Double-clicking a window’s outer title bar centers the view on it, and pop-up windows follow their parent window.
The launcher provides another way to reach apps without navigating the city. For anyone whose workspace is already crowded, Alt + Tab and live previews also offer familiar ways to switch windows.
Each display keeps its own view
Starling 0.5.0 gives every display its own scene and camera. Walking, turning or pointer-driven parallax on one screen leaves the view on another screen unchanged.
Two documented ways to run Starling
Starling’s release describes a native Ubuntu package and a Windows setup through WSL2. The latter uses Ubuntu inside WSL2 and delivers the desktop over Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
| Configuration | Base environment | Package or display path |
| Native | Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, amd64 | .deb package |
| Windows through WSL2 | Ubuntu 26.04, amd64 | RDP display mode |
Graphics and first-frame performance
Starling describes the project as an early preview. In a software-rendered test virtual machine, the first frame of the city took 15.3 seconds; the release recommends hardware acceleration for exploring it.
The release reports graphics testing with AMD, Intel and NVIDIA hardware, as well as VirtIO-GPU/virgl in a virtual machine. Its validation figures include 4,307 XCTest tests and 822 Swift Testing tests passed. The accelerated-VM gate recorded 34 checks passed and six skipped; the software-rendered-VM gate recorded 28 passed and 12 skipped. All 15 WSL checks passed.
