A workstation is a place you inhabit, not a device you carry.
Mercurius is built on the idea that your real computer remains itself — persistent, stable, and ready when you return.
Philosophy
Mercurius begins with a simple belief: a workstation is not a disposable appliance, but a long‑lived environment that accumulates tools, history, habits, and identity. It is a place you inhabit, not a device you carry.
Modern computing assumes the opposite. Laptops are treated as the centre of gravity. Cloud services assume your real environment lives elsewhere. Remote access is bolted on through pixel streaming or brittle protocol layers.
Mercurius rejects this model. It treats the workstation as the authoritative home of your computing life, and the network as the means by which you reach it — cleanly, explicitly, and without illusion.
This philosophy differs from both X11 and Wayland. X11 exposed everything, enabling powerful workflows but entangling them with global state and legacy behaviour. Wayland exposes almost nothing, prioritising security and local correctness but omitting the semantics that remote presence and automation rely on. Mercurius takes a third path: explicit structure without legacy, and remote semantics without global state.
Security is a first‑class design constraint in Mercurius, not an optional layer or a historical accident. X11’s model assumed a world in which every machine on the network was physically nearby and socially trusted — a small departmental LAN where you literally knew everyone in the room personally. That assumption collapsed decades ago. Today’s networks are porous, mobile, and global: laptops roam between untrusted environments, containers and virtual machines run together on the same hosts. The boundary between “local” and “remote” is no longer meaningful in a world where network packets could come from anywhere.
Wayland responded to this reality by removing remote access entirely, choosing correctness over capability. Mercurius takes a different path. It treats authentication, authorisation, and session establishment as explicit protocol mechanisms, negotiated and enforced before any window or surface is created. This structure allows Mercurius to support secure remote presence without reviving the global state or implicit trust of X11, and without abandoning the network altogether. It is a modern answer to a modern threat model.
Mercurius is not competing with Wayland. It explores a different set of priorities: clarity, explicit semantics, and a protocol designed from the outset for remote presence. It is a clean, modest alternative — not a replacement.
Mercurius expresses this philosophy through the idea of a Portal. A Portal is not a computer, nor a client in the traditional sense, but the place you sit at that moment: the attachment point through which you inhabit a long‑lived workstation. When you sit down at a portal — whether it is the workstation’s own console, a quiet machine in another room, a thin client elsewhere on the LAN, or from another workstation — you are not starting a new environment. You are attaching to a Session that already exists. You might resume the coding session you detached from yesterday afternoon, or the gaming session you left running the night before, without restarting applications or reconstructing context. A portal simply connects you to the environment that persists on the workstation.
Crucially, a portal is “here” and your session is “there”. The portal has no applications, no state, and no identity of its own; it is interchangeable and disposable. Even the workstation’s own keyboard, mouse, and display behave as just another Portal — a local seat implemented using the same protocol and the same semantics. In the simplest case, a USB‑C dock can provide two portals onto the same workstation without involving a network at all. In the broader Mercurius model, portals on the LAN or across routed networks behave the same way: they are seats, not peers, and the Session remains authoritative on the workstation.
The core principles are:
- A workstation is a presence, not a box.
- You should be able to inhabit it from anywhere.
- Remote interaction should feel native, not emulated.
- Windows, focus, and input are first‑class concepts.
- The protocol should be explicit, deterministic, and free of hidden state.
- Mechanisms belong in the protocol; policy belongs in the workstation.
- Transparency and introspection are features, not flaws.
Mercurius is the connective tissue that makes this philosophy practical.
Mercurius is intended to be quietly useful rather than disruptive. Like SSH, it only works if it can be freely adopted, embedded, and extended without permission. The protocol and reference implementation are being developed as open infrastructure: something that can slot into existing systems, coexist with X11 and Wayland, and gradually earn trust by doing one thing well.