GNOME Kiosk provides a desktop environment suitable for fixed purpose, or single application deployments like wall displays and point-of-sale systems.

It provides a very minimal wayland display server and compositor and Xorg compositor and window manager. It automatically starts applications fullscreen.

Notably, GNOME Kiosk features no panels, dashes, or docks that could distract from the application using it as a platform.

In order to demonstrate how GNOME Kiosk functions, there is one provided sample application. It is a search appliance that shows https://www.google.com in a full screen Mozilla Firefox window.

The search appliance ships with three parts:

1. A GNOME Display Manager session file that gets installed in /usr/share/xsessions and /usr/share/wayland-sessions. This file is responsible for telling the display manager how to start the session. It informs the display manager to start GNOME Session in a special, custom mode, designed specifically for setting up the kiosk environment.
2. A GNOME Session session description file that gets installed in /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions. This file is responsible for telling GNOME Session which components to start for the kiosk environment. The two components the session description file describes are GNOME Kiosk and Mozilla Firefox.
3. A custom application desktop file for firefox to run it in its kiosk mode pointed at https://www.google.com

GNOME Kiosk will automatically set up the list of available keyboard layouts based on GSettings and failing that, localed configuration.

Layout switching can be performed using the standard GNOME keybindings, which default to Super-Space an Shift-Super-Space, and may be reconfigured using GSettings.

Because a central design ideal behind GNOME Kiosk is that it offers no persistent UI elements, there is no builtin way aside from the above mentioned keybindings to change keyboard layouts.

Deployments that require an on screen keyboard layout indicator need to implement it themselves as part of their fullscreen application. GNOME Kiosk provides D-Bus APIs to set, list, and switch between keyboard layouts.

A sample application is provided to show how these APIs function.

GNOME Kiosk is still in early development. Use cases and new ideas are actively being considered. Some future improvements that may occur:

It's clear that not all target deployments where GNOME Kiosk is used will have keyboards. It's likely that in the future GNOME Kiosk will ship with an optional on screen keyboard.

At the moment GNOME Kiosk has limited support for extended methods (such as Chinese input), using IBus. The functionality relies on IBus's own UI for selecting input candidates.

It's possible that at some point GNOME Kiosk will add some dedicated UI for input methods to use, instead of relying on IBus's UI.

One use case for GNOME Kiosk is to show a non-interactive display most of the time, but provide a way for someone to unlock the display and interact with the application.

At the moment, it's up to the application to lock itself down, but in the future, GNOME Kiosk may provide a transparent screen lock option, to assist the application.

To contribute, open merge requests at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-kiosk.

GNOME Kiosk is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. See the COPYING file for details.

NOTE: Much of the original code is copyright Red Hat, Inc., but there is no copyright assignment and individual contributions are subject to the copyright of their contributors.