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7/7/2026
Building a GUI from scratch in Rust — how IONA OS does compositing, widgets, and applications

Building a GUI from scratch in Rust — how IONA OS does compositing, widgets, and applications

Short summary

A developer details building a complete GUI stack from scratch in Rust for IONA OS, including a glass compositor with double-buffering, custom widget traits, and working applications like a browser, terminal, and system monitor. The article covers the three-layer architecture (compositor, widgets, apps) and explains the motivation of full sovereignty over the rendering pipeline with no external toolkit dependencies. A public ISO release is targeted for September 15, 2026.

  • •IONA OS GUI built entirely in Rust with no Qt, GTK, or WebView dependencies
  • •Three-layer architecture: compositor, widget trait system, and functional applications
  • •Public ISO release scheduled for September 15, 2026

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.

#open-source
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