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A Tiny Linux Desktop Companion — and Wayland and GTK Kept Getting in the Way
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The first version of Mochi was supposed to be simple... I wanted to draw a small character, put him on the desktop, let him walk around, react to clicks, and occasionally do something cute. Instead, I ended up debugging window coordinates across XWayland, fighting GTK popovers on multiple monitors, and learning that “just move the window” is not a complete desktop architecture. Mochi is a tiny Linux desktop companion I’ve been building with Python, GTK, Cairo, and a lot of hand-drawn pixel art. He walks around the desktop, reacts when you pick him up, falls asleep when you’ve been away, notices when you’re typing, and can even sit down with his own little laptop while you work. The most interesting part of building him, though, hasn’t really been the animation system. It has been trying to make a tiny character behave like part of the desktop when the desktop was designed to keep normal applications from doing exactly that. The idea started with Codex Pets One of my original inspirations was Codex Pets .
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