ChonkStep 0.5.0 preview — Mac mode, live Spaces and capture

ChonkStep 0.5.0 brings Mac keyboard mode and live Spaces previews to Linux.

• Command shortcuts across native and XWayland apps, including terminal copy/paste.
• Independent Spaces per display, with live thumbnails showing actual windows and positions.
• Command-Shift-5 capture controls; saved screenshots open in imv and recordings in Omacut.
• Improved frame pacing, asynchronous capture, and GPU pipeline diagnostics.
• Reusable 1080p demo tooling with screenshots, captioned videos, and frame verification.

Validated with 315 local E2E tests, 2,107 Rust tests, 93 harness tests, and 24 native NVIDIA checks at 4K/144 Hz. Native checks include three live mode-toggle cycles, clipboard transfer/persistence, terminal shortcuts, live Spaces pixels, fullscreen restore, screenshot export into imv, and recording export into Omacut. Another 49 targeted workflows passed against the exact release executable. See the attached validation report for executable identities and test scope.

Mac mode is optional. Overlay scanout and broader primary-plane acceptance remain off by default. This follows the existing preview release channel; the linked guides document remaining macOS parity and hardware limits.

Spaces walkthrough · Capture walkthrough · Release notes · Repeatable demos

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Native Arch packages for ChonkStep 0.5.0 while AUR account registration is unavailable.

See the ChonkStep 0.5.0 release notes for changes, validation and known limitations.

The LCOS workflow also attaches an amd64 X11 package and its checksum
to this release. See LCOS installation
for download and verification instructions.

Install on x86-64 or ARM64/AArch64 Arch with:

chonkstep_dir="$(mktemp -d)"
chonkstep_arch="$(uname -m)"
chonkstep_pkg="chonkstep-0.5.0-1-$chonkstep_arch.pkg.tar.zst"
curl -fL -o "$chonkstep_dir/$chonkstep_pkg"   "https://github.com/iconidentify/chonkstep/releases/download/preview-v0.5.0/$chonkstep_pkg"
curl -fL -o "$chonkstep_dir/SHA256SUMS"   "https://github.com/iconidentify/chonkstep/releases/download/preview-v0.5.0/SHA256SUMS"
(cd "$chonkstep_dir" && sha256sum --ignore-missing --check SHA256SUMS)
sudo pacman -U "$chonkstep_dir/$chonkstep_pkg"
omarchy install desktop-chonkstep

Downloading first is required on systems whose pacman configuration
requires repository-style signatures for remote package URLs. This
preview path uses the checksum above and GitHub build provenance.

Supported package architectures are x86_64 and aarch64. The
AArch64 package is built natively against Arch Linux ARM; upstream
Omarchy itself does not yet provide an official ARM64 installation.

Verify a downloaded package's GitHub build provenance with:

gh attestation verify "$chonkstep_dir/$chonkstep_pkg" --repo iconidentify/chonkstep   --signer-workflow iconidentify/chonkstep/.github/workflows/package.yml

Each architecture also has a chonkstep-debug- package. It is not
needed to run the desktop, and installing it changes nothing about
how the desktop behaves. It carries the debug symbols, so install it
before reporting a crash — without it every ChonkStep frame in a
coredump reads as ??, and Arch's debuginfod does not carry
symbols for packages installed this way:

chonkstep_debug_pkg="chonkstep-debug-0.5.0-1-$chonkstep_arch.pkg.tar.zst"
curl -fL -o "$chonkstep_dir/$chonkstep_debug_pkg"   "https://github.com/iconidentify/chonkstep/releases/download/preview-v0.5.0/$chonkstep_debug_pkg"
sudo pacman -U "$chonkstep_dir/$chonkstep_debug_pkg"
coredumpctl gdb chonkstep-wayland   # now shows file:line, not ??

SHA256SUMS covers all four package files, and every one of them
carries GitHub build provenance. This is a prerelease distribution
path; the eventual stable v0.5.0 tag will also publish the
source recipe to the AUR.