Vela (or Vela Desktop) is an independent, open-source desktop environment for Linux designed as a modern, fluid, and sharp system for today's hardware. Built as a unified desktop rather than a collection of separate utilities, it combines its own Wayland compositor, Vulkan renderer, Qt Quick shell, file manager, and settings app. Released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license, Vela is currently in usable Alpha status.

Key features and capabilities of Vela include:

• Cohesive Modern Shell: Integrates a live acrylic blur background across panels, a Start menu with instant search and pinned apps, Task View with live window/desktop previews, a notification center, clipboard history, and a built-in snipping tool.

• Advanced Snap Layouts: Supports window snapping into halves, quarters, and six flyout arrangements (via drag, Super + arrow keys, or hovering the maximize button), creating snap groups that the taskbar manages and restores together.

• Custom Vulkan 1.4 Architecture: Built on wlroots for Wayland socket handling, but features its own custom scene graph and Vulkan 1.4 renderer with no OpenGL fallback or reliance on default wlr_scene renderers.

• Fluid, Monitor-Paced Rendering: Drives animations based on actual monitor vblanks (from 60 Hz up to 360 Hz) and renders frames as late as safely possible. If one application slows down, Vela prevents it from holding back the rest of the desktop or cursor.

• Pixel-Exact Fractional Scaling: Renders application buffers at exact physical pixel scales (such as 125% or 175%) without bilinear smearing, rounding window edges to physical pixels so snapped windows align without gaps or overlaps.

• Crash Resilience & Audio Engine: Uses a supervisor process to hold the Wayland socket if the compositor crashes—allowing applications to reconnect seamlessly—while keeping the lock screen secured via ext-session-lock. It also features native PipeWire and WirePlumber integration that plays audio at native sample rates.

• Lightweight Idle Footprint: Operates with an idle memory footprint of approximately 17 MiB PSS and 0.1% CPU usage.