Programmer's Day 2026: thanks to those who make VasakOS possible

Today, 13 September 2026, is day 256 of the year (2⁸). That’s why we celebrate Programmer’s Day: 256 is the number of values that fit in a byte, the basic unit of our craft.

From VasakOS we want to take this date to publicly thank the upstream projects and people without whom our desktop would not exist. We are not an island: every line of code we write stands on the shoulders of giants.

🦀 Tauri: the engine of our native apps#

All of VasakOS’s own applications —Terminal, File Manager, Music, Settings, Session Manager— are written in Rust + Tauri.

• Tauri 1.0 (June 2022) gave us a real alternative to Electron: 600 KB binaries instead of 100 MB, Rust in the backend, system WebView (WebKitGTK on Linux) instead of bundled Chromium.
• Tauri 2.0 (2024) brought mobile support, official plugins, and a mature API for system tray, custom windows, native menus and sidecars.
• The Tauri team (Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, Lucas Ferfoglia, Fabian Larsen, and dozens of contributors) responds to issues, reviews PRs, and maintains compatibility with WebKitGTK and GTK4 —critical for us on Wayland.
• Special thanks to Lucas Ferfoglia and Fabian Larsen for their work on the bundler, window plugins, and webview-webkitgtk integration.

Without Tauri, our native apps wouldn’t be «native»: they’d be Electron in disguise.

🎛 WirePlumber: the audio brain that saved us#

VasakOS uses PipeWire as the multimedia server and WirePlumber as session policy manager. In 2025 we reported a critical issue: Bluetooth A2DP devices wouldn’t reconnect after suspend/hibernate (wireplumber/wireplumber#412).

• The WirePlumber team (George Kiagiadakis, Julian Bouzas, and the rest of Collabora) analysed, reproduced and patched the bug in days.
• The fix landed in wireplumber 0.5.6 and reached Arch —and thus VasakOS— the same week.
• Their work on libpipewire, spa and the policy API lets us write routing rules (e.g. «if headphones appear, move audio there») without touching C.

WirePlumber is the invisible glue that makes audio «just work» on Wayland.

🪟 Wayfire: the compositor we chose for our desktop#

Our shell, vasak-desktop, is a Wayfire plugin (Wayland Compositor based on wlroots).

• Wayfire gives us wlroots (the base library for Wayland compositors) with a C++ plugin architecture that lets us write the shell as just another plugin: vasak-shell, vasak-panel, vasak-overlay, vasak-workspaces…
• The Wayfire team (Ivan Vuković, David Rosca, and contributors) keeps wlroots in sync with every Wayland Protocols release, adds support for foreign toplevel management, layer-shell, xdg-activation… everything a modern desktop needs.
• When we needed 3-4 finger trackpad gestures to switch workspaces, Wayfire already had the infrastructure; we only had to map it.

Wayfire + wlroots = hackable Wayland compositor, no reinventing the wheel.

🐧 And, of course: Linux, Arch, systemd, Mesa, PipeWire, GTK, WebKitGTK, Rust, Cargo…#

The list is long. Every pacman -Syu on VasakOS brings work from:

• Kernel developers (drm, input, usb, bluetooth, fs…)
• Mesa / Radeon / Intel / AMD / Nouveau (open GPU drivers)
• systemd (logind, udev, resolved, oomd…)
• PipeWire + WirePlumber (audio/video)
• GTK 4 / libadwaita (widgets, theming, accessibility)
• WebKitGTK (Tauri’s WebView engine on Linux)
• Rust / Cargo / rustup (the language and toolchain of our apps)
• Arch Linux (rolling, pacman, AUR, wiki, community)

How we give back#

1. Upstream first: if we touch code in Tauri, WirePlumber, Wayfire, wlroots, wlroots-rs, gtk-rs, webkitgtk-rs… the patch goes to their repo first. Only if they don’t accept (rare) do we keep it in a temporary fork.
2. We report bugs well: minimal steps, logs, journalctl, coredumpctl, exact version. Maintainers appreciate it.
3. We package for Arch: our PKGBUILDs live in PKGBUILDS/ and many end up in [extra] or the AUR.
4. We document: the   VasakOS wiki and the   developer guide explain how the pieces fit so others don’t have to rediscover it.

A toast to open source#

256 (0x100, 1«8, 2⁸) is a round number in binary. But what’s truly round is being able to build on the work of thousands of people who chose to share it.

Thanks, Tauri team. Thanks, WirePlumber team. Thanks, Wayfire team. Thanks, kernel hackers. Thanks, Arch developers. Thanks, Rustaceans. Thanks to every maintainer who reviewed a PR at 23:00 on a Sunday.

Happy Programmer’s Day! 🥂

Which upstream project do you want to thank today? Tell us on   Telegram or   GitHub . And if you want to join, our   contribution guide is open.