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Digital Clock 4 — Linux Fork

⚠️ This is a modified version of Digital Clock 4, not the original program. Original: Digital Clock 4, Copyright (C) 2013-2020 Nick Korotysh · forked from Kolcha/DigitalClock4 · modified by ENum (GitHub: Enumber) · licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later (unchanged) · see MODIFICATIONS.md for exactly what was changed and when.

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An open-source desktop clock for Linux — 21 skins, 15 plugins, one-command install. Qt 5, works fully on X11 (see the Wayland note below). Maintained.

Upstream supported Linux but never packaged it: the last Linux release (4.7.9, December 2020) is a bare tarball with no installer and no desktop integration. Upstream was archived in 2026 and is no longer developed — Linux fixes now happen in this repository. This fork builds cleanly from a fresh checkout, installs with one command, ships the same skins and plugins the Windows build does, fixes a number of long-standing bugs, and never phones home.

git clone https://github.com/Enumber/DigitalClock4.git && cd DigitalClock4 && bash install.sh

Features

Everything the official Windows build has, on Linux:

• 21 skins — the 19 that ship with the official Windows package, plus the two built-in ones. Or use any system font instead of a skin.
• 210 textures, any color, adjustable opacity and zoom
• stays on top / click-through / drag to position
• resilient multi-monitor placement — new setups prefer a non-primary display; positions are saved per physical monitor, a disconnected clock moves to an available screen, and it returns to its original screen and position after reconnect or reboot. Non-primary screens may overlap their panel area (the position setting labels this explicitly as Allows overlap with panel).
• 15 plugins: alarm, chime, countdown timer, date, IP address, quick note, random position, scheduler, spectrum clock, stopwatch, talking clock, tray colour, variable translucency, power off, any zoom
• UI follows the system language — English and 简体中文 both complete (upstream also has Русский and Português across all components, and Nederlands for the main window only); anything else falls back to English
• built-in "start at login" toggle in Settings, and the installer can set it up for you too — no manual autostart setup either way
• no update checker and no update notifications; the program does not contact the network on its own — 4.7.9 is the final 4.x release and there is nothing left to check for

Note on Wayland: the clock positions itself by calling move(), which Wayland does not permit, so it cannot be dragged or restore its position there. On X11 everything works normally. See docs/why-linux-still-works.md for the details and the workaround.

Install

git clone https://github.com/Enumber/DigitalClock4.git
cd DigitalClock4
bash install.sh

With a display it opens a graphical installer (TTY interview if none) that asks where to install (your home directory, any custom path — admin-owned locations like /opt just prompt for your password via sudo — or system-wide), whether to start automatically at login, and whether you want a desktop icon. The desktop icon is marked trusted, so double-clicking it launches the clock directly, with no "allow launching" confirmation.

Non-interactive use: bash install.sh --system, --prefix DIR, --autostart, --no-desktop-icon, --uninstall (GUI confirmation when a display is available), --help.

Build dependencies (Debian/Ubuntu; the installer builds from source automatically when no prebuilt binary is present):

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools \
  qttools5-dev-tools libqt5svg5-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev \
  libqt5texttospeech5-dev libxi-dev

Updating

There is no in-app updater by design (see Features above) — 4.7.9 is the final 4.x release, so a version check has nothing to look for. To pick up fixes from this fork, git pull and run bash install.sh again; it detects the running clock, stops it, replaces the files, and starts it back up.

Help wanted

This fork exists because the official Linux build was abandoned mid-tarball. It has had real use and real bug fixes, but it is one person's spare-time maintenance, not a team effort. Bug reports, testing on window managers other than the ones this was verified on, and PRs are all very welcome. 🙂

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License

GPL-3.0-or-later, same as upstream — see LICENSE.txt. Original work © 2013-2020 Nick Korotysh. Vendored third-party libraries: QHotkey (BSD-3-Clause), SingleApplication (MIT). The bundled skins/ and textures/ are not covered by that statement: they are third-party artwork redistributed from the official Windows package and we make no licence claim about them — see skins/README.md. The original upstream README is preserved at docs/README.upstream.md.