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Swen edited this page Oct 10, 2026
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Tide Island is a lightweight desktop widget for Wayland, inspired by Apple's Dynamic Island.
We want better performance, lower resource usage, and more room for future development.
Unlike the previous Quickshell-based version, the new Tide Island uses a native OpenGL renderer, removing the QML component system, JavaScript runtime, and Qt dependencies.
Tide Island follows a few simple principles:
- Lightweight: Minimize unnecessary dependencies and memory usage.
- Performance: Use hardware-accelerated rendering and event-driven updates.
- Flexibility: Keep the architecture modular and extensible.
- Simplicity: Avoid unnecessary abstraction and complexity.
Tide Island is written primarily in modern C++ and uses OpenGL for rendering, Wayland for desktop integration, and FreeType and HarfBuzz for text rendering.
The new architecture gives us more direct control over rendering, animations, memory usage, and resource management.