AppStream is a cross-distribution effort for enhancing the way we interact with the software repositories provided by distributions by standardizing software component metadata. It provides the foundation to build software-center applications, by providing metadata necessary for an application-centric view on package repositories. It additionally provides specifications for things like an unified software metadata database, screenshot services and various other things needed to create user-friendly application-centers for distributions.

libxdg-basedir is a C library providing some functions to use with the freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory specification.

UDisks provides interfaces to enumerate and perform operations on disks and storage devices. Any application (including unprivileged ones) can access the udisksd(8) daemon via the name org.freedesktop.UDisks2 on the system message bus.

File::DesktopEntry parses .desktop files defined by the Freedesktop.org Desktop Entry specification. It can also run the applications define in those files.

Telepathy Mission Control 5 is an account manager and channel dispatcher for the Telepathy framework, allowing user interfaces and other clients to share connections to real-time communication services without conflicting.

File::Basedir can be used to find directories and files as specified by the Freedesktop.org Base Directory Specification. This specifications gives a mechanism to locate directories for configuration, application data and cache data.

libsfdo is a collection of libraries which implement some of the freedesktop.org specifications.

Telepathy logger is a headless observer client that logs information received by the Telepathy framework. It features pluggable backends to log different sorts of messages in different formats.

xdg-desktop-portal is a portal front-end service for Flatpak and possibly other desktop containment frameworks. It works by exposing a series of D-Bus interfaces known as portals under a well-known name (org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop) and object path (/org/freedesktop/portal/desktop).

The portal interfaces include APIs for file access, opening URIs, printing and others.

This package contains a number of commandline utilities for use inside Flatpak sandboxes and other containers, like guix shell --container. They work by talking to portals. Currently, there is flatpak-spawn for running commands in sandboxes as well as xdg-open and xdg-email, which are compatible with the well-known scripts of the same name.

This package provides a Hyprland implementation of wayland-scanner, in and for C++.

This package provides Wayland protocol extensions for Hyprland.

Gabble is a Jabber/XMPP connection manager for the Telepathy framework, currently supporting:

• single-user chats

• multi-user chats

• voice/video calling

• file transfer

with Jabber/XMPP interoperability.

Telepathy is a D-Bus framework for unifying real time communication, including instant messaging, voice calls and video calls. It abstracts differences between protocols to provide a unified interface for applications.

Plymouth is an application that runs very early in the boot process and that provides a graphical boot animation while the boot process happens in the background. You are not supposed to install this on your own, it is only useful with system integration.

A library to allow applications to export a menu, originally into the Unity menu bar. Based on KSNI, it also works in KDE and will fallback to generic Systray support if none of those are available.

This package contains a few command line utilities for working with desktop entries:

desktop-file-validate

Validates a desktop file and prints warnings/errors about desktop entry specification violations.

desktop-file-install

Installs a desktop file to the applications directory, optionally munging it a bit in transit.

update-desktop-database

Updates the database containing a cache of MIME types handled by desktop files.

File::Mimeinfo can be used to determine the MIME type of a file. It tries to implement the Freedesktop specification for a shared MIME database.

This package also contains two related utilities:

• mimetype determines a file's MIME type;

• mimeopen opens files in an appropriate program according to their MIME type.

libfprint is a library designed to make it easy for application developers to add support for consumer fingerprint readers to their software.

ModemManager is a DBus-activated daemon which controls mobile broadband (2G/3G/4G) devices and connections. Whether built-in devices, USB dongles, bluetooth-paired telephones, or professional RS232/USB devices with external power supplies, ModemManager is able to prepare and configure the modems and setup connections with them.

libqrtr-glib is a glib-based library to use and manage the QRTR (Qualcomm IPC Router) bus.

This library supports a subset of the ATA S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) functionality.

The udiskie program is a udisks2 front-end that manages removable media such as CDs or flash drives from userspace.

Its features include:

• automount removable media,

• notifications,

• tray icon,

• command line tools for manual (un)mounting,

• LUKS encrypted devices,

• unlocking with keyfiles,

• loop devices (mounting ISO archives),

• password caching.

libportal provides GIO-style async APIs for most Flatpak portals.

Weston is the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, and a useful compositor in its own right.

A Wayland compositor allows applications to render to a shared offscreen buffer using OpenGL ES. The compositor then culls the hidden parts and composes the final output. A Wayland compositor is essentially a multiplexer to the KMS/DRM Linux kernel devices.