{"slug": "rewindos-searchable-screen-history-for-linux-local", "title": "RewindOS – Searchable screen history for Linux local", "summary": "RewindOS, a private, open-source alternative to Windows Recall and Rewind.ai, launches for Linux with fully local screen capture, OCR, and AI search. The MIT-licensed tool runs entirely on-device with no cloud, account, or telemetry, offering sub-100ms full-text search and optional hybrid search via Ollama. It supports Wayland capture on KDE, GNOME, and wlroots compositors, and includes an MCP server for querying screen history from Claude Code.", "body_md": "A private, open-source alternative to **Windows Recall** and **Rewind.ai**. Everything you've ever seen on your screen, instantly searchable — **no cloud, no account, no telemetry, 100% on your machine.**\n\n|\n|\n\n**Ask** — chat your history with cited screenshots\n\n**Truly local.** Capture, OCR, search, and AI all run on your machine. No cloud, no account, no telemetry — it works fully offline.**Open source.** MIT-licensed. Read every line, audit what it stores, fork it.**Built for Linux.** Native Wayland capture via`xdg-desktop-portal`\n\n+ PipeWire — works on KDE, GNOME, and wlroots compositors. No competitor ships here.**Fast.** SQLite FTS5 gives sub-100ms full-text search across weeks of screen history.\n\n| RewindOS | Windows Recall | Rewind.ai | |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| Linux / Wayland | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |\n| Open source | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |\n| Local-only, no cloud | ✅ | ✅ 1 |\n✅ |\n| No subscription | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |\n| Bring-your-own AI (local or API) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |\n| Independent — not shut down / acqui-hired | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ 2 |\n\n1 on-device, but closed-source and Windows-only. 2 Rewind → Limitless → acquired by Meta; the Mac app's capture was disabled Dec 19, 2025, and EU/UK data deleted.\n\nRewind got the privacy model right — it stored everything locally too — but it was macOS-only, proprietary, and is now gone. RewindOS is the open-source, Linux-native version that no acquisition can switch off.\n\nAlso open source:\n\n[omi]— but macOS-only and cloud-backed. RewindOS stays fully local and Linux-native.\n\n**🔎 Search & Recall**\nFull-text search across everything on your screen in under 100ms. Optional **hybrid search** fuses keyword + semantic results (Ollama embeddings, Reciprocal Rank Fusion). Perceptual hashing skips near-identical frames, and scene grouping keeps results clean.\n\n**🎞️ Browse & Replay**\nScroll your screen history chronologically with hourly grouping, or scrub through it as a **timelapse** with speed controls and keyboard navigation. A **dashboard** surfaces app-usage stats, daily/hourly activity charts, and a heatmap calendar.\n\n**🤖 Ask AI**\nAsk questions about your screen history and get answers with **inline citations**, a Sources card, and click-through to the exact screenshots. Backed by **Claude Code** (opus / sonnet / haiku) or local **Ollama** via a per-chat model picker. Pin screenshots as context; copy, regenerate, and follow-up.\n\n**🔌 Works with Claude Code & any MCP client**\nThe daemon ships an [MCP](https://modelcontextprotocol.io) server, so you can query your screen history straight from Claude Code (or any MCP-capable agent) — \"what was that doc I had open yesterday?\" — without leaving your terminal. Exposes tools for search, timeline, recent activity, app usage, per-screenshot detail, and meeting transcripts; all local, same database the app uses.\n\n**🗂️ Organize**\nA rich-text **journal** (Tiptap) with tags, templates, screenshot attachments, and AI summaries. **Bookmarks & collections** to save what matters. **Vault export** writes daily memory notes (journal, recap, meetings, key moments, stats) straight into your Obsidian or Logseq vault.\n\n**🔒 Privacy**\nExclude specific apps or window-title patterns (password managers, private browsing). Global hotkey `Ctrl+Shift+Space`\n\nopens search instantly; the app runs quietly in the system tray.\n\nRewindOS reaches the network on its own for one thing: a daily check-in (the app's update check and the capture daemon's heartbeat) via a small [Cloudflare Worker](/jaypopat/rewindos/blob/master/workers/update-proxy) (open source, in this repo). The worker hashes your IP with a daily, server-only salt to count **distinct active devices**, then discards it — no IP, no identifier, no payload is ever stored. All it keeps is an anonymous daily count, bucketed by app version and desktop environment (so the project can see release adoption and KDE-vs-GNOME mix); both are aggregate counts, never tied to you. The full dataset is [published live](https://rewindos-updates.incident-agent.workers.dev/stats). Opt out entirely with `usage_heartbeat = false`\n\nunder `[privacy]`\n\nin `~/.rewindos/config.toml`\n\n. (The update check also falls back to GitHub directly if the worker is down.)\n\n```\nyay -S rewindos-bin     # or: paru -S rewindos-bin\nsystemctl --user enable --now rewindos-daemon.service\n```\n\nRewindOS is local-first and privacy-focused, so the recommended install is **download, read, then run**:\n\n```\ncurl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jaypopat/rewindos/master/scripts/install.sh -o install.sh\nless install.sh          # read what it does\nbash install.sh\n```\n\nPrefer a one-liner? (Same script, run directly.)\n\n```\ncurl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jaypopat/rewindos/master/scripts/install.sh | bash\n```\n\nThe installer detects your distro, installs the system dependencies (Tesseract, PipeWire, the webview, and the right desktop portal), downloads and **checksum-verifies** the latest release, and enables the capture daemon as a systemd user service.\n\n**Options**\n\n```\nbash install.sh --with-paddleocr   # higher-accuracy OCR (heavier Python deps)\nbash install.sh --update           # update to the latest release\nbash install.sh --uninstall        # remove RewindOS (asks before deleting your data)\n```\n\n**Requirements:** x86_64, a modern Wayland desktop (KDE, GNOME, Hyprland, Sway), and a current distro. The prebuilt binary targets recent glibc + `webkit2gtk-4.1`\n\n; on older distros, build from source.\n\nThese are off by default; RewindOS works fully without them.\n\n[Ollama](https://ollama.com)— local semantic search, chat, and journal summaries (everything stays on-device).- Claude Code CLI — higher-quality chat; once installed and registered with MCP, the Ask view's model picker exposes its tiers (opus / sonnet / haiku).\n\nA background daemon captures screenshots every 5 seconds, deduplicates them with perceptual hashing, runs OCR via Tesseract, and indexes the extracted text into SQLite FTS5. A Tauri desktop app provides search, browsing, journaling, and analytics.\n\n```\nTimer (5s) → Screen Capture → Hash & Dedupe → OCR → SQLite FTS5\n```\n\nLinux on **Wayland**. Capture uses `xdg-desktop-portal`\n\n+ PipeWire, so it works on any compositor that implements the ScreenCast portal.\n\n| Desktop | Status |\n|---|---|\n| KDE Plasma 6+ | ✅ Tested |\n| GNOME 46+ | ✅ Tested — install the \"Window Calls Extended\" extension for app/window names |\n| Hyprland · Sway · other wlroots |\n\nx86_64 only for prebuilt binaries. X11-only sessions aren't supported.\n\nAfter installation, the daemon starts automatically. The UI autostarts minimized to the system tray.\n\n**Open search**:`Ctrl+Shift+Space`\n\n**View logs**:`journalctl --user -u rewindos-daemon -f`\n\n**Restart daemon**:`systemctl --user restart rewindos-daemon`\n\n**Launch UI manually**:`rewindos`\n\n**Daemon CLI**:`rewindos-daemon pause | resume | status | backfill`\n\nAt default settings (~5s interval, 8h/day):\n\n| Metric | Estimate |\n|---|---|\n| Frames/day (after dedup) | ~2,880 |\n| Storage/day | ~210 MB |\n| 90-day retention | ~19 GB |\n\nScreenshots are stored as WebP in `~/.rewindos/`\n\n. Retention is configurable.\n\n**Build from source**\n\nThe `install.sh`\n\npath above installs system dependencies for you — this section is only if you'd rather build it yourself.\n\n```\nsudo apt install \\\n  libpipewire-0.3-dev \\\n  tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng \\\n  libclang-dev libsqlite3-dev \\\n  libdbus-1-dev pkg-config build-essential\n```\n\nTasks are run with [ just](https://github.com/casey/just) (\n\n`cargo install just`\n\n):\n\n```\njust install\n```\n\nThis builds the Rust workspace and frontend, installs the daemon as a systemd user service, and sets up the desktop app to autostart minimized to tray on login.\n\n**Manual / dev build**\n\n```\ncargo build --workspace       # Rust crates\nbun install                   # Frontend deps\nbun run tauri dev             # Run in dev mode\n```\n\n**Configuration**\n\nConfig lives at `~/.rewindos/config.toml`\n\n. Key options:\n\n**Capture interval** and change sensitivity threshold**Excluded apps** and window title patterns (e.g. password managers, private browsing)**Retention period** and storage limits**OCR language** and worker count**Ollama endpoint** for AI features (semantic search, chat, summaries)**App categories**— custom app→category rules for the activity breakdown (Settings → General)\n\n**Project layout**\n\n```\ncrates/rewindos-core/     Shared lib (DB, OCR, hashing, config, embedding, chat)\ncrates/rewindos-daemon/   Capture daemon (PipeWire, pipeline, D-Bus, window info)\nsrc-tauri/                Tauri app (commands, D-Bus client, AI chat)\nsrc/                      React frontend\n  components/             Reusable UI components (search, charts, shared)\n  features/               Feature views (ask, dashboard, history, journal, rewind, saved, settings)\n  hooks/                  Custom React hooks\n  context/                React context providers\n  lib/                    API wrappers, utilities, query keys\ndocs/                     Architecture & design docs\nsystemd/                  Service files and desktop entries\n```\n\nMIT", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rewindos-searchable-screen-history-for-linux-local", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/jaypopat/rewindos", "published_at": "2026-06-16 11:16:40+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-16 11:49:01.079158+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "developer-tools", "ai-tools", "computer-vision"], "entities": ["RewindOS", "Windows Recall", "Rewind.ai", "Meta", "Ollama", "Claude Code", "SQLite", "Wayland"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rewindos-searchable-screen-history-for-linux-local", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rewindos-searchable-screen-history-for-linux-local.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rewindos-searchable-screen-history-for-linux-local.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rewindos-searchable-screen-history-for-linux-local.jsonld"}}