Xenon v4.11.0: Xenon runs on Mac and Linux, and your phone or tablet can be the screen
Xenon started as a dashboard for one screen. This release is about it stopping being that. Xenon now runs on macOS and Linux as well as Windows, and the phone or tablet already in your hand can be one of its screens. Both of those are beta, and the app says so where you meet them.
There is a lot else here: a Store you can browse without installing anything, widgets that do not have to be rectangles, real controls on the Claude Code tile, and a long list of fixes, several of which were reported by people here and on Discord.
New
Xenon runs on macOS, and Linux catches up. Both are beta. On a Mac you get the dashboard, the sensors, the media tile that knows what is playing, an app switcher that needs no permission prompt, search and the Disk widget, and an installer and updater that work like the Windows ones. On Linux you get in-game FPS, game mode, the global search shortcut, a now-playing tile that needs nothing installed, an app switcher that no longer asks you to install anything, and an AppImage, a .deb and a .rpm. Settings stops offering features that cannot exist on your system, instead of offering them and failing.
Your phone or tablet can be the second screen. Pair a device from Settings and the dashboard opens on it over your home network, laid out for a phone rather than shrunk to fit one. A paired device is treated as your dashboard, not as a guest: the controls work. It can also be a proper encrypted connection that works away from home, and it can tell you something happened while the app is closed. Every part of this is beta and labelled.
You can send photos and files straight from your phone to this PC, and back. It runs over that same paired connection. Nothing goes through anyone's cloud.
You can try Xenon in your browser, without installing anything. Every theme, background and page in the catalog has a "Try in your browser" button, so you can see a creation running before you decide.
Your phone's contacts, call history and keypad are on the dashboard, and when someone calls you, the dashboard rings.
The Claude Code widget does something real now. When Claude asks you to choose between options, you tap an option and answer, and the session carries on with your choice. Before, the card showed the question and the one button on it just made the card go away.
A widget does not have to be a rectangle. Tiles can be given a shape, and a widget you install can arrive with its own. Three of the per-tile effects turned out to be doing nothing at all, and now do what they say; a tile can also be completely transparent.
Wave Link works again, and the mixer tile is a real one. "Could not reach Wave Link, is the app running?" had become the answer to four different problems, and one of them was Xenon's own.
Watching and streaming are separate now. The YouTube widget plays YouTube, streaming to YouTube is its own widget that can actually start a stream, and Twitch has a watching widget of its own. Community widgets can use both.
Widget creators: widgets can show which apps are using your CPU, memory and GPU, fill the screen when tapped, seek through the track they are showing, turn one person in a Discord call up or down, follow the Pixel Retro skin, and arrive with their own tile shape. Three gaps in the SDK are closed and the store's write limit is written down.
The Store's front page can be arranged, and it has an Archive that, unlike before, shows things. The Supporters and Limited sections are real carousels. What supporting actually gets you is now the first thing on the catalog page.
Changed
The website has been rebuilt, hands you the right download for your system instead of assuming a PC, and has an FAQ that starts with the thing that stops people, which is Windows calling Xenon a virus.
Xenon stops describing itself as a Xeneon Edge accessory. It is a dashboard for any screen you can spare, and the Edge is one of them.
Everything your phone does with Xenon is in its own Settings section, and setting it up is a guide inside Xenon rather than a link to a website.
Your Gemini key stops leaving your PC. It was being sent to the browser and handed straight back, which since paired devices exist meant crossing your network. Nothing you do changes.
Fixed
The file index no longer rebuilds itself over and over, eating a processor core for as long as the PC is on. Measured on a real install, it was re-reading the whole of C: about every twenty seconds, for hours, and each pass threw away what it had. The cause was the recovery, not the fault.
Installing from inside the zip window no longer produces an install that breaks weeks later. Double-clicking the zip in Explorer does not unpack it, so the install went into a temporary folder and worked until Windows cleared it, taking your settings, notes and layout with it. The installer now recognises this before installing anything.
A failed update can no longer delete files from the working install while rolling back.
Your settings could be silently replaced by the defaults on load if you had a community widget on a tile. They are not any more.
A dashboard from an installation you replaced can no longer come back over the new one. A phone paired before you wiped the PC could republish its old layout over your fresh one.
Every Store widget was unreadable on an iPhone or iPad, and widgets came up as white boxes on a paired phone, with reloading making it worse. Both are fixed.
Uninstalling now also undoes what Xenon set up inside other programs, and everything it had left starting at sign-in.
Ambient Mode stays on when you turn it on during a game.
Plus around seventy more, including a Deck key made by pasting a path copied from Explorer, a round widget being squashed into an oval, "show in folder" opening the wrong folder, a Performance Mode session you started by hand never ending, searching for a short common word finding nothing, the Browser tile leaving the page filling only part of it, two screens showing two different forecasts for the same city, and a screen that keeps disconnecting no longer having Xenon fight it every three seconds.
Full details for every change are in CHANGELOG.md.
Installing
New install on Windows: download Xenon-Setup-x64.exe below. On macOS: Xenon-macOS-universal.dmg. On Linux: Xenon-Linux-x86_64.AppImage, .deb or .rpm. Existing install: Xenon updates itself, or use Settings, Updates.
Some antivirus software flags the setup, because it downloads what it installs and sets Xenon to start with your session, and nothing here is code signed yet. The hashes above are signed, so you can check your download against SHA256SUMS. If Windows blocks it, this section of the README explains how to tell which kind of detection you are looking at, how to verify the file, and how to restore it.