A walk round the desktop.

Bigger where you need it, and light or dark to suit the room.

With the ring closed, the screen shows only your windows and your wallpaper. Push the pointer against the very edge of the screen, any edge, and double click: the ring appears. Moving the pointer there on its own never opens it, and neither does a single click, so it does not pop up by accident. A double click on the empty desktop opens it too, and so does the Super key; over a full-screen window, only Super does. On a touch screen, double tap the empty desktop or tap in either top corner. Escape, or a click outside the circle, closes it.

When a program has something to tell you, an email arrived or a download finished, a circle pops out in the corner of the screen you chose and goes again after a few seconds. It holds most of the message and has round buttons to close it, pin it or snooze it. Point at it and it grows to hold the whole message. When two or more are out, a button clears them all.

The notifications button in the middle of the ring opens everything that has been said, newest first, with the time beside each. Pin the ones worth keeping and they gather at the top. The bin beside one forgets it, and the bin at the foot of the list forgets the rest, once you click it a second time.

The clipboard button in the middle of the ring opens a panel there of what you copied lately, newest first, with a filter box to find one.

• Click a line and it goes back on the clipboard and nowhere else, and the ring closes. You paste it yourself, so nothing lands in a box you did not choose.
• Pin the lines worth keeping; they stay at the top.
• The bin beside a line forgets that one, which is what you want for a password copied by mistake. The bin at the foot forgets the rest, once you click it a second time.

Screenshot is an app of its own. Press Print, or Super, Shift and S on a keyboard with no Print key, or press the camera button in the middle of the ring.

The screen holds still. Drag across the part you want, or press the round button for the whole screen, or the cross to change your mind. The part can then be moved, and made bigger or smaller by its corners and edges, and a small card of tools opens beside it.

Shift and Print skips all of that and keeps the whole screen at once, saved and copied. When it is saved or copied, the word Done shows for a moment.

Folders is Trindle’s own file manager, and it starts among the favourites in the ring. It opens network shares, phones and cameras, and its right-click menu can extract and compress archives and compare two files or folders. A file’s Properties show its checksums.

Left alone for a while, the screen goes dark with only the time on it, drifting slowly about. Any key or movement brings everything back. The screensaver is also in the ring, under Power, for when you want it now.

Locking has its own time, whatever the screen and sleep times are. When it locks, it rests the same way, the clock carrying on from the screensaver, until you come back and the PIN or the password appears. The desktop never shows in between: not your windows, not your email, not what you were reading.

Activity, from its button in the middle of the ring or from Settings, About this computer, opens on what the computer is doing at this moment, said in one plain sentence at the top: “All calm”, “Firefox is doing most of the work right now”, “Your computer is flat out: Steam and Firefox are using all 16 threads”.

Under it the computer is drawn as a room. The big circle is the memory, and every program is a bubble in it, as big as the memory it holds, so the fuller the room, the fuller the memory. A program that is working glows and gently beats, faster and brighter the harder it works, blue for a little work, orange for hard work and red for flat out. Round the edge is one bar for each of the processor’s threads, growing and warming as it gets busier, so sixteen threads all flat out are seen at a glance, and the brightest bubble says why. Beside the room, the program working hardest and the one holding the most memory are named. Click a bubble and a card says what it is doing in plain figures: how hard it is working, how much memory it holds, how long it has been running and how many parts it has.

Trindle’s own share of the memory is picked out in the highlight colour, yellow unless you chose another. It counts everything Trindle runs to be the desktop: trindle-compose, Trindle’s own compositor, which draws the screen, the Xwayland it starts for older programs, the ring, the wallpaper and their helpers. And it is counted honestly, the way tools like smem count: memory two programs share is split fairly between them, and memory moved out to the swap file is included, so nothing is counted twice and nothing is left out.

Every part of a program is added together, so Firefox is one bubble however many tabs it has, and there are two quiet grey bubbles: Trindle desktop, the same figure as Trindle’s share on the memory ring, and Linux and other programs. A program that has stopped answering can be closed from its card with a stop button that asks twice. Down the side, four rings fill and empty smoothly as things change: memory, the processor, the disk, and the swap file or, on a computer without one, the processor’s temperature.

Keys, if you want them

Everything can be done with the mouse. These are only quicker ways. Super is the key with the Windows sign on most keyboards.