Desktop

A hearth host that has a screen (a laptop like the blade, not a headless VM) can run a graphical desktop. It is optional and off by default; a server VM does not need it.

Enabling it

hearth.desktop.enable = true;

Option	Type	Default	Meaning
`hearth.desktop.enable`	boolean	`false`	Turn on the KDE Plasma desktop.
`hearth.desktop.autoLoginUser`	string	`"operator"`	User auto-logged into the Plasma session at boot.

What you get

KDE Plasma 6 on X11, with SDDM as the display manager and auto-login into the Plasma session.
A curated app set: Firefox, Google Chrome, Discord, Konsole, Dolphin, Kate, plus conky and fastfetch.
A conky desktop widget showing live CPU, RAM, GPU, and network graphs and top processes, sitting on the desktop layer behind your windows.
The per-user theme, wallpaper, panel, and shortcuts are declared with plasma-manager in nixos/home/operator.nix, so the look is reproducible, not hand-configured.
The world view cockpit opens automatically at login (and from a desktop icon) in a dedicated Chrome app window, and Meta+A toggles a fullscreen view. Both use their own Chrome profile so they never fight your normal browser session.

Interaction with the boot dashboard

When the desktop is on, SDDM owns the screen, so hearth drops the console auto-login that would otherwise launch the text dashboard on the TTY. The boot dashboard is still available over SSH.

Always-on hosts

A desktop host that doubles as an always-on agent box should not suspend. The blade host, for example, disables sleep, suspend, hibernate, and lid-switch actions so it stays reachable. Mirror that on any host you want always up.