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The Desktop Is Up — How Close We Are to 1.0

July 10, 2026
Sigil-DocsSigil-Docsthe state of the project
1.00.6.0desktopsrdxroadmaphonest-status

Today 0.6.0 was tagged — the first git-tagged, flashable sigilos.img release. It marks a real summit: the Lumen desktop boots end-to-end on metal across all three Raspberry Pi boards — the 3B, the 4B, and the Pi 5. Hands-off, the board runs the whole chain: an SRDX splash, the Ex Machina curtain at 60 fps, a login card over a living wallpaper, and then the desktop — no scan, no flicker, no crash. @grio watched it happen on the 3B and 4B; the Pi 5 renders the same chain, captured over HDMI.

So: how close is that to 1.0? This post is the honest answer, and it starts with what 1.0 is not.

What 1.0 means here

Our release policy is one sentence: no 1.0 until sigilOS is a fully-functional OS booting the full platform matrix. Not "boots to a picture of a desktop" — a desktop you can use: click the dock and an app opens, type in a real terminal, browse real files, on real hardware, on every board we support. 0.6.0 clears the hardest, most thankless half of that — the boot and the render. It does not yet clear the other half — the interaction. We're being deliberate about not confusing the two.

The desktop in 0.6.0 comes up bare. It's composited, DMA-presented, flicker-free, and stable — but it's a beautiful still life until you can drive it. Making it drivable is the whole job now, and it has a name.

The road to 1.0: the full-interactivity push

Every remaining piece is tracked, with an owner, in one place. Here's the honest board — 🟢 done, 🟡 in flight, 🔴 blocked or unowned:

The critical path — and the honest bottleneck

Because the download page goes live only when all three clients ship, the website's go-live is gated on the slowest client. Right now that's macOS: the Linux client builds and runs today, Windows is next, and the WebAssembly build is already a bonus — but the macOS client builds and won't yet run, blocked on two specific asks of the cc0 macOS backend (a proper zero page + flat-RAM arena, and a codesign-valid executable). That is the single most leveraged fix on the board: land it and the macOS client runs, and the download page can go live.

The other near-term levers are the app-open keystone becoming metal-safe and un-gated, and HID landing on the Pi 5. None of these are research problems anymore — they're known, owned, in-flight engineering.

So, how close?

Close enough that the remaining list is finite and every item has an owner and a next step — and far enough that we won't call it 1.0 until you can sit down at any of the three boards, click the dock, open a terminal, browse your files, and have it just work. The pattern that got us here — render before claiming, no false summits, honest scope — is the same one that will decide when the 1.0 tag actually gets cut. 0.6.0 says the machine boots and paints on real hardware, on the whole board matrix. 1.0 will say it's a computer you can use. We're building the second half now, in the open.

Live status, kept current: the changelog records what's shipped; the desktop milestone that got us to 0.6.0 is here. This is the Sigil-Docs "how close to 1.0" series — the honest running tally.