Krill is a suite of small, single-purpose Linux apps built by one person. Every app shares the same five colors, the same quiet chrome, and the same refusal to grow a settings panel. This page is the reasoning.
People don't bounce off Linux because of the kernel. They bounce off it because the apps look stuck in 1998 and act like they want you to read a manual first. A Windows or Mac user tries the switch, opens the default image editor, and quietly goes back.
The usual answer is configurability — if you don't like it, theme it. But configurability is the problem in a different coat. An app that can look like anything usually looks like nothing, and the person who most needs a calm, finished tool is the person least interested in building one out of checkboxes.
Krill bets that the fix is a suite: many small apps — a text editor, a markdown editor, a PDF reader, a paint canvas, an RSS reader, a system monitor — that share one palette, one titlebar, one window shape, one release pipeline. Open three of them side by side and your desktop looks like one product, because it is one.
Small apps stay finished. Krill Paint does not need layers to be done; Krill Text Editor does not need language modes. Each app has a sentence-long job, reaches 1.0, and then mostly receives bug fixes. Feature creep is the failure mode — every "small addition" is one more thing the next person has to learn.
Sharing everything is also what makes a suite this size — and still growing — maintainable by one person: the chrome comes from one package, the file plumbing from another, the release workflow from a third. Each new app is mostly the same app with a different center.
Every pixel of chrome in every krill app comes from these five. No themes, no user palettes, no sixth color for that one component. The discipline is what makes the apps feel calm.
The decisions are made on your behalf and the surface stays bounded. If a feature can't be explained in a sentence, it doesn't ship.
No tabs, no project trees, no vaults, no split panes. The work in front of you is the work.
Your files live on your disk in their original format. Nothing phones home — not even a crash reporter.
Real binaries, real file associations, XDG dirs. No Electron, no web app pretending to be desktop. Windows and macOS are someone else's job.
Every app is Tauri 2 — a Rust core with a TypeScript front end —
shipped as an AppImage and a .deb
from GitHub Releases. The shared chrome (titlebar, menus, status
line, the palette itself) lives in one library; the shared plumbing
(state dirs, file I/O, window geometry) in another. An app that
ships is a thin, honest layer over both.
Everything is MIT licensed. If you don't trust the binaries, build them yourself — each repo is small enough to actually read.
Many apps, one look. Install one in a line, or browse the suite and pick the tool you're missing.