Editions

One desktop, Openbox, light and beautiful. Tiling window managers may follow.

Every lensOS install shares the same base: the Arch repos plus [lensos], the linux-lens kernel, the lens package manager, the installer, and the lensOS look.

Openbox: the lensOS desktop

lensOS’s desktop is Openbox, a classic floating window manager on X11, set up to be light and beautiful at once: it idles in under 800 MB of memory and about 1% of the processor, and runs well on older machines. lensOS ships it with a floating bar (polybar) with widgets you pick in Settings, a dock (plank), the kitty terminal with a lensOS prompt (starship) and system summary (fastfetch, or hyfetch in a pride flag’s colours), the rofi launcher, dunst notifications, picom for blur, rounded corners, shadows and motion, and desktop icons if you want them. One key switches the whole look between themes (see theming), and Settings changes everything else without editing a file.

Also built in:

screenshots of the screen, an area or a window, copied to the clipboard and saved
a lock screen over a blurred picture of your desktop, before sleep and after idle time
lid and power settings: sleep, lock or nothing when you close the lid, the power button opens a menu, low-battery warnings, power modes
volume and brightness keys with a small popup, stopping at 100% unless you allow more
clipboard history (Super + V) and an emoji picker (Super + .)
Phone (Super + P, preview): your iPhone’s or Android phone’s notifications, calls, texts, contacts and music, over Bluetooth with nothing to install on the phone (set it up in Settings → Phone)
a notification sidebar (Super + N, or the bell on the bar): your past notifications on frosted glass, sliding in from the right, with do not disturb and Clear all; the bell shows how many came since you last looked
several monitors: a screen you plug in turns on by itself, with its own bar and a copy of the dock; drag screens into place in Settings, and layouts come back when you plug the same screens in
a Windows widget on the bar: your open windows, to bring back or minimize with a click
night light on a schedule, and a pointer in screen shares for apps like Discord that leave it out
* for each character when you type a password for sudo

keys	what it does
`Super` (tap) / `Super` + `Space`	open an app (rofi)
`Super` + `Enter`	terminal (kitty)
`Super` + `I` / `T`	Settings / switch theme
`Super` + `E` / `W`	files / web browser
`Super` + `V` / `.`	clipboard history / emoji
`Super` + `Q`	close the window
`Super` + `←` / `→` / `↑`	snap left / right, maximize
`Super` + `Alt` + arrows	snap to a quarter
`Super` + `1`–`9`	switch desktop (`Shift` to move the window there)
`Super` + `L` / `X`	lock / power menu
`Super` + `N` / `P`	past notifications (the sidebar) / Phone
`Print` / `Super` + `Shift` + `S` / `Alt` + `Print`	screenshot of the screen / an area / the window

Right-click the desktop for a menu with the same shortcuts plus themes, updates, volume and network. The configs live in ~/.config (openbox, polybar, kitty, rofi, picom, dunst, starship.toml, fastfetch) and are yours to edit; theme colours and Settings’ choices come in from separate generated files, so neither ever overwrites your changes. On computers where OpenGL runs in software (virtual machines, or no GPU driver yet), effects fall back to a lighter mode without blur.

Hyprland, bspwm, i3, Sway, niri (maybe later)

Tiling window managers for keyboard-driven workflows, each themed and set up on first boot, if they can stay as light as the Openbox desktop.

What happened to KDE Plasma?

lensOS started out with a KDE Plasma edition. In October 2026 it was retired, so lensOS can do one thing well: a desktop that’s light and beautiful at the same time. There are no new KDE ISOs. Computers that already run the KDE edition keep working and keep getting updates (Arch’s packages, lens, the kernel and drivers); only its KDE-specific settings stay as they are.