This release is a public beta. Expect occasional bugs, rough edges, and unfinished features. Feedback and issue reports are welcome as the project matures toward a stable release.
Boson
Boson is an AI-powered scientific study companion built for the GNOME desktop, designed around the philosophy of 'Atomic Progress' — the idea that small, consistent sessions accumulate into meaningful achievements over time. At its core, Boson combines a smart focus timer with an always-available AI study chat, giving students and researchers a seamless workflow between focused work and instant knowledge access. The application features multiple timer modes including Pomodoro, custom-length sessions, a stopwatch, and break timers, complete with session history, daily/weekly/monthly statistics, and focus streaks to track progress. Its AI chat companion is powered by six LLM providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Groq, NVIDIA, and OpenCode Zen — with a dynamic model registry synced from models.dev, rich Markdown rendering, KaTeX math support, and a pluggable tool layer for web search, calculator, Wikipedia lookup, file reading, and code execution. Boson is written entirely in GJS (GNOME JavaScript) using GTK 4 and libadwaita 1 for a modern, adaptive interface that conforms to GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines, with native support for light/dark themes, accent colors, and a suite of timer themes like Atomic, Quantum, Nebula, and Aurora. It integrates deeply with the desktop through DBus activation, the GNOME Secret Service for secure API key storage, and Discord Rich Presence for accountability. The build system uses Meson with Ninja, and the app is distributed as a Flatpak on Flathub targeting the GNOME 50 runtime. Boson is fully bilingual with English and Arabic support, including complete right-to-left (RTL) layout handling, powered by Gettext for internationalization. The tech stack also includes GIO for networking and I/O, GLib for core utilities, GObject for the type system, custom CSS styling, SSE streaming for real-time AI responses, and ESLint for code quality, with GitHub Actions handling CI and automated Flatpak releases.
Tech Stack
Install & Download
Boson ships as a self-contained Flatpak — everything is bundled, no system dependencies to worry about. Pick the install path that fits your setup.
- 1Download the .flatpak file using the button below (Linux x86_64).
- 2Open a terminal in the folder where the file was downloaded (usually ~/Downloads).
- 3Install it for your user: flatpak install --user --from boson-0.1.0-beta.2-linux-x86_64.flatpak
- 4Launch Boson from your app menu, or run: flatpak run org.atom.boson
- 5Open Settings → AI Providers and add at least one API key to unlock the chat companion.
Download Flatpakv0.1.0-beta.2
Direct download — works on any modern Linux distribution. · File size: 137 KB
Install via Flathub (coming soon)
Once approved on Flathub, you'll be able to install it with a single command.
Known Issues & Limitations
- Sessions may occasionally fail to save if the app is force-killed mid-session — graceful shutdown handling is still a work in progress.
- AI chat streaming can occasionally drop or time out on certain models — retry usually fixes it, but the reconnect logic needs hardening.
- The dynamic model registry relies on models.dev — offline / restricted-network users will see stale or empty model lists.
- No macOS or Windows support yet — Boson targets the GNOME 50 runtime and is Linux-only for now.
- Some UI strings and a handful of long-form Markdown edge cases are not fully translated or rendered perfectly in Arabic RTL.
- Theming may look off on non-GNOME desktops (KDE, Cinnamon, etc.) — the app follows libadwaita but visual quirks can still appear.
User Reviews
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