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Applications

Two kinds of application run on LinuxTouch, and the difference matters only to whoever is writing them. To the user, and to the switcher, they are identical: fullscreen windows that Start and Select navigate between.

1. Ordinary Debian applications

Mail clients, browsers, editors, viewers — anything with a .desktop file.

Nothing is required to make one appear. apt install thunderbird puts Thunderbird on the home screen at the next apps.rescan, with its own icon from whatever theme provides it. There is no whitelist, no manifest, and no per-app support code anywhere in this repository. That is what makes "full Linux" a literal claim rather than a marketing one.

What LinuxTouch does to them:
Fullscreen A sway for_window rule forces it, Wayland and XWayland alike. No title bar, no borders.
Touch libinput delivers real touch events; GTK3/4 and Qt5/6 handle them natively, including kinetic scrolling. X11 apps get pointer emulation through XWayland.
Keyboard Every key reaches the app verbatim, including A/B/X/Y/L/R. LinuxTouch grabs only Pause and Print.
Dialogs Open floating and centred at 560×380 rather than fullscreen, so a confirmation is visibly attached to something.

The honest limitation

A 640×480 screen is smaller than any desktop application was designed for. Menus will be dense, some dialogs will need scrolling, and a few apps with fixed minimum window sizes will be clipped. LinuxTouch does not pretend otherwise and does not try to rescale them, because a downscaled app is an unreadable app on a 3.5" panel.

Where an application is genuinely unusable, the answer is a first-party app that does the one thing that was needed — which is what the next section is for.

Console programs

Terminal=true entries are launched inside x-terminal-emulator (Debian's alternatives symlink — lxterminal on this image), so btop, htop, and friends are grid apps like anything else.

2. First-party LinuxTouch apps

For things no desktop application does well at this size. The read-only FreeCAD viewer is the first of these.

They are web apps in their own Chromium window. Not screens inside the shell — separate windows, so they appear in the switcher, can be closed, and cannot take the home screen down with them when they crash.

Why a web app rather than GTK or Qt

  • It reuses shell/css/shell.css, so a first-party app looks like part of the system without re-implementing the design.
  • It can be developed against make mock on a workstation.
  • For a 3D viewer specifically, the browser is where the mature libraries are.

The pattern

  1. Put the app under apps/<name>/ with its own index.html.
  2. Serve it from touchd by adding the directory to the static route, or ship it as its own directory under /usr/share/linuxtouch/apps/.
  3. Add a .desktop file so it appears on the grid like anything else:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=CAD Viewer
Comment=Read-only STEP and FCStd viewer
Icon=applications-engineering
Exec=linuxtouch-app cad-viewer
Categories=Graphics;Viewer;
  1. linuxtouch-app is a thin wrapper around the same Chromium invocation as bin/linuxtouch-shell, pointed at the app's URL with a distinct --user-data-dir.

Because it launches through a .desktop file, it is discovered, hidden, and launched by exactly the same code path as Thunderbird. There is no "first-party" branch in modules/apps.py, and there should never be one.

Notes for the FreeCAD viewer specifically

Read-only viewing does not need FreeCAD. FreeCAD itself is a large Qt application whose UI is unusable at 640×480, and its Python API is not something to run on the critical path of a touch UI.

The tractable shape is a browser-side viewer: parse STEP with a WASM OCCT importer, render with WebGL, and drive the camera from touch gestures — one finger to orbit, two to pan and zoom. Model files come from the filesystem via a touchd method rather than a file input, since there is no file picker worth using at this size.

That is a design sketch, not a built thing. Nothing in this repository implements it yet.

Hiding apps

61 .desktop entries were present on the stock image, and a good number of them are Raspberry Pi OS configuration tools that make no sense on a handheld. Settings → Apps toggles any entry's visibility on the grid. It hides, it does not uninstall: the app stays on the system, and the hidden list is stored in settings.json under hidden_apps.