One accent, everywhere
Blue, red, green, white or a custom color tints borders, bar, launcher, notifications and wallpaper together. Light and dark theme, one key away: SUPER + T, or one click in the Control Center.
Windows & workspaces
Wayland compositor (Hyprland): title bars with close, minimize, maximize; three workspaces; fluid animations that scale back automatically inside virtual machines.
Files & search
File manager with thumbnails for images, PDFs and video. Search that indexes file contents too: text from PDFs, and OCR from images in Italian and English.
Opens everything
140+ file types: PDF, images (JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, SVG…), audio & video (MP4, MOV, AVI, MP3…), archives (ZIP, RAR, 7z, TAR…), text and documents.
Yours to arrange
Change the icon of any desktop shortcut with your own image: right-click it and choose Change Icon. The picture is copied into the system, so it stays even if you move the original. The text editor can have a white or a black page, independent of the desktop.
Instant menus
The menus of the bar, from the ZETA RAYS logo to search, network, sound and power, stay ready in memory: one click and they are open, with fresh data. Another click, or Esc, closes them.
Never stuck
Ctrl + Alt + Esc turns the pointer into a crosshair: click the window that stopped responding and it closes, together with every process it started, first politely and then by force. Ctrl + Shift + Esc closes the active window at once. And when memory is about to run out, the heaviest program is closed before the computer freezes, with a notification that tells you which.
Ctrl + Alt + Delete
One panel for emergencies: task manager, close a frozen program, terminal, restore the desktop, lock, log out, restart, shut down. It works even when an app has stopped responding.
Switch apps
Ctrl + Tab shows the open apps, most recently used first: keep Ctrl down, press Tab, release to switch. Esc cancels, Ctrl + Q quits the chosen app.
ZETA Share
Send files instantly to nearby devices: phones and computers, Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac and Linux. Right-click, Share. The files travel on your local network, never through the internet.
Minimized, in sight
A minimized window shrinks into a live preview next to the dock, with the icon of its app, and grows back with one click. Right-click for Restore and Close.
Folder colors
Right-click a folder and choose Folder Color: red, white, green, blue or purple, like on a Mac. On the desktop the whole folder takes the color, in the file manager a colored dot marks it; Default brings the standard folder back. The color stays after a restart and nothing inside the folder changes.
Displays
Settings, Displays: resolution, refresh rate, scale and orientation for every display, a map to arrange two or more by dragging, mirror or a single display, and the main display. A new setup is checked and asks to be kept; without an answer the previous one comes back after 15 seconds. Windows never end up out of reach: their title bar always stays on screen.
Your dock
Drag the apps in Settings to put them in the order you like; the order stays after a restart. Right-click any icon for Open, Close, Remove from Dock, Options and the settings of the app.
From the browser to the desktop
Drop an image or a file from Firefox or Chromium onto the desktop and it becomes a real file, with its own name, right where you left it; a link becomes a shortcut to the page. An interrupted download leaves nothing broken behind, and nothing is ever overwritten.
Your apps, by default
Choose the browser, mail, file manager, terminal, editor, media player, image and PDF viewer. Every program follows the choice, and so do the keyboard shortcuts.
Wi-Fi without surprises
WPA2, WPA3 and mixed networks, on 2.4 and 5 GHz, hidden ones too. “Wrong password” appears only when the router really refused it: a slow or distant router is told apart, and the right password is never thrown away. You can retype a wrong one right away, and change the password of a saved network or forget it.
Remote access
SSH client and server, scp, sftp, sshfs and netcat are included. On an installed system the SSH server is on and accepts connections from your local network and from the internet, with your password (for the internet your router must forward port 22); in the live session and in the OVA it stays off until you turn it on. One switch in Settings turns it on or off, a second one limits it to your local network; from a terminal: sudo zeta-ssh on and off. Root cannot log in, repeated attempts from the same address are dropped, and every computer gets its own server keys. Your choice is kept after a restart. One active firewall, nftables; ufw is there too, off, with the rules for SSH and sharing already in place if you turn it on.
Mail
Mozilla Thunderbird, one click from the dock, in your language. A dot tells you it is open.
A real terminal
Tabs, splits, bash, zsh and fish. Sessions that survive closing the window, a searchable history of every command with folder and result, and no password ever saved in it.
A desktop that stays up
Force-closing a program while one of its menus was open could bring down the whole desktop, a known bug of Hyprland 0.55. ZETA RAYS ships Hyprland with the official fix, and if the desktop ever crashes anyway it comes back by itself in a few seconds, with your settings.
Text out of pictures
Super + Shift + T and drag over any part of the screen, a web page, a photo, a paused video: the text inside goes straight to the clipboard. Right-click an image or a PDF to do the same with a file. Italian and English, all on your computer.
Next to other systems
Installed alongside another Linux distribution or Windows, the boot menu finds them and lists them, with five seconds to choose. It uses its own EFI folder, so it never overwrites another system's boot files, and Secure Boot keeps working after installation. If a machine ever stops booting, the USB stick carries a repair tool that puts the boot menu back without touching partitions or data. And the installer checks its own work: if the boot loader did not make it to the disk, it stops and says why, instead of reporting success. The boot loader is installed from the USB stick itself, so the installation works with or without a network, also when started from the live session.
Ready to work
Printing (CUPS) with automatic detection of network and USB printers. Removable drives and network shares mounted automatically.
Included in the system, one click away in Settings, Appearance. Or just ask ZETA: set the wallpaper to red waves.