Noctia: A sleek and minimal desktop shell thoughtfully crafted for Wayland

https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell

by doener • 6 months ago

97 28 6 months ago

github.com

gigatexal• 6 months ago

Should pair well with my tons of noctua fans [1] ;-)

[1]https://gigatexal.blog/assets/images/about/workstation.JPEG

All jokes aside, it looks really well done!

Cyphase• 6 months ago

s/Noctia/Noctalia/g

miduil2• 6 months ago

Wow, Noctalia looks amazing! I'm especially excited about the automatic theme by background image, that means my live updating wallpaper also tweaks the theme :) super fun.

gunalx2• 6 months ago

That is exactly the only feature I would like to disable. (have custom theming already)

miduil2• 6 months ago

Checkout the Settings panel, in the GitHub screencast this feature is shown in the there.

arikrahman2• 6 months ago

I don't know, dank-material-shell fills the same niche, and works better on NixOS out of the box, making it easier to setup while highly configurable. It seems broader than Noctalia in scope as well, so there are more components and they play nicer with each other.

Noctalia seems like it would fit more slimmer builds that want to move away from waybar.

arikrahman2• 6 months ago

Noctia* Gnome's Nautilus stuck in my mind gahh

zerocrates• 6 months ago

It actually is Noctalia; mistake in the HN title.

while_true_• 6 months ago

Still using X11, so no Noctia for me. Patiently waiting for somebody/someone to get remote desktop on Wayland. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481912

MaxRegret• 6 months ago

You probably know this already, but the problem isn't remote desktop into a logged-in session (krdp supports this) but rather logging in remotely into a headless server without a local session running. This is slightly more complicated because the login manager has to get involved and present its UI remotely. This is what that bug is tracking.

If you're happy to use Gnome with GDM as the login manager, remote headless sessions are supported already with gnome-remote-desktop: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless....

silon42• 6 months ago

Personally, I am fine with starting sessions via ssh, don't need extra remote login.

tapoxi• 6 months ago

This is something implemented by the compositor, so with KDE this may be addressed by the new Plasma Login Manager. GNOME already supports this.

torginus2• 6 months ago

I'm not familiar with the space, but wouldnt something that streams the whole screen like a video (WebRTC or Moonlight and VNC works like this ) work here too as well, and would be universal? Wayland already supports screen capture (into a texture, at interactive framerates) fairly well.

Tajnymag• 6 months ago

I'd say the problematic part is not capturing the desktop but injecting controls into it. Proper universal support for simulated input is still missing.

theYipster• 6 months ago

I’ve been trying out both DMS and Noctalia in separate VMs this week (both on Niri.) I like them both. Noctalia seems a bit more refined out of the box. DMS is more customizable. I foresee both taking over from .dotfile packs (and maybe even Omarchy) as better ways to bootstrap a Nir or Hyprland.

snapplebobapple• 6 months ago

it doesnt have dotfiles? how fp you sync c(nfig between machibes?

gunalx2• 5 months ago

It does habe dotfiles. (.config/noctalia. it is possible to declare mostly declaratively if you want)

dfc• 6 months ago

At first I thought "desktop shell" was supposed to be compositor, but that's not the case, a wayland compositor like sway is a requirement. I've been using sway for years I have no idea what a "shell" is? It's somewhere in between a desktop environment and a theme?

dmit• 6 months ago

Yes. It occupies the spot in the Sway tutorials that recommend you "waybar, fuzzel, tofi, [etc]" to fill out the necessities. Noctalia, DMS, and other Quickshell projects cover that void.

sbinnee• 6 months ago

I have no idea what shell means either! Isn’t it called ricing to customize desktop environment? Since when do people started calling it shell?

Valodim• 6 months ago

I'm not sure about Linux, but on Windows it's been called that since forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell

tvshtr• 6 months ago

Noctalia (it's quickshell theme/env underneath) is to compositor as KDE Plasma is to Kwin. Coincidentally both arr built on QtQuick.

ankurdhama• 6 months ago

Usually a Wayland compositor just do very few things like compose different program windows to your display output and feed the focused window input events. Desktop elements like wallpaper, panel/dock etc are considered part of "desktop shell". Gnome have mutter as compositor and gnome-shell as shell (although they are same process). KDE has Kwin as compositor and plasma-shell as desktop shell.

Tiberium• 6 months ago

Quite cool that it's possible now to create entire shells with AI-assisted programming

gedy• 6 months ago

DankMaterialShell[0] with catpuccin theme is close to this and way much easier (for me at least) to set up.

[0] https://danklinux.com/

Noctia: A sleek and minimal desktop shell thoughtfully crafted for Wayland

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