Background
Mercurius did not begin as a graphics project. It began as a question: why has the idea of a networked workstation quietly disappeared? For decades, Unix systems treated the network as an extension of the machine. A workstation was a place you inhabited, not a device you carried.
My own background shapes this view. I grew up with long‑lived machines that mattered: HP 9845B workstations, Apple IIs, BBC Micros, and early Unix systems. I have been using Unix machines at home since Acorn RISCiX. My first proper job was at STC Optical Cable Development Labs, writing software for HP workstations and sharing it through the HP Users’ Group long before “open source” was a phrase. Later, as a Research Associate at Edinburgh University, part of my role involved administering a network of Sun workstations. Those machines were not appliances. They were environments with continuity, personality, and history.
My understanding of “long‑lived Unix machines” was not earned from the outside. It comes from years spent inside them: working on kernel behaviour, tracing failure paths, and helping keep real systems stable so they stay up for months or years at a time. That experience is part of why Mercurius cares so much about security, responsibility, behaviour and continuity: it is built by someone who has seen what happens when those things are treated as optional.
My current network continues that tradition: a workstationi, xavier, that has evolved continuously for more than fifteen years. It began life with an i7 motherboard, 32 GiB of RAM, and a single 1TB disk; since then it has been upgraded, expanded, and re‑architected piece by piece — new motherboard, new storage, new graphics cards, new layout, new capabilities — without ever losing its identity. It is now a 5.5GHz i9 with 128GiB RAM and 38TB of disks in RAID0. A true Ship‑of‑Theseus machine: the same workstation, not because its parts are unchanged, but because its history, its environment, and its role have persisted throughout. Around it lives a network of small Unix systems, each doing one job well. In that world, the workstation is not a disposable box but an enduring presence.
I have a small studio where I play music, and there I use a silent mini‑PC as a thin client. I do not want a second monster machine, and I do not want to maintain two environments. xavier is a magnificent computer that can complete a full, clean Yocto rebuild in around twenty minutes — but the CPU reaches 100 °C and the fans run at full speed while it does so. I do not want that in the studio. But I do want to use that existing workstation, the one that has grown with me for years, and reach it from anywhere without pretending that a laptop or a mini‑PC is its equal. There is a 10 Gb/s fibre run between them. It must be doable.
X11 deserves enormous credit for demonstrating what this could look like. It showed that windows, input, and interaction could move across the network without losing their semantics. But X11’s design is inseparable from its legacy: global state, implicit trust, and decades of accumulated behaviour.
Wayland deserves equal credit for modernising the local graphics stack. Its clarity of scope — doing local graphics well — is a strength. But that scope is intentionally narrow. Wayland assumes a laptop‑centric, local‑only workflow. It omits window‑management semantics by design. It does not attempt to support remote presence, automation, introspection, or multi‑window structure across the network. These are not bugs; they are deliberate choices.
Many applications — from CAD tools to scientific environments — rely on behaviours that Wayland intentionally does not provide. These are not “unfinished features”; they are outside the model. X11 provided them, but only as a side effect of a much larger, older architecture.
Existing remote‑desktop systems treat the workstation as a pixel source. They move images, not windows; frames, not meaning. They cannot express the structure of a desktop environment, and they cannot make a remote workstation feel like a place you inhabit.
Mercurius exists to fill this gap. It is not a replacement for X11 or Wayland. It is the missing piece: a clean, modern, structured protocol for inhabiting a long‑lived workstation across the network, with windows, focus, and input treated as first‑class concepts.