Noctia: A sleek and minimal desktop shell thoughtfully crafted for Wayland(github.com)
56 pointsby doener11 hours ago9 comments
  • dfc6 hours 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?
    • dmit5 hours 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.
  • while_true_7 hours 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
    • MaxRegret5 hours 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....

    • tapoxi4 hours 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.
    • its_ubuntu6 hours ago
      Isn't it great how we just keep reinventing the same old wheel over and over and over again?

      A light weight, minimal window manager for Wayland! How nice! We already had a hundred of those for X11.

      • mrln6 hours ago
        This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious. You might not like wayland and that's fine with me, but if you decide to hate on it, you should at least know what you are hating on. There are good reasons to prefer a wayland compositor over X11. If you don't care about these reasons, that doesn't mean nobody should.
      • helterskelter4 hours ago
        Wayland got rid of screen tearing, an issue that plagued every machine I had used with X since I started using Linux in 2003/2004. That alone was enough for me to switch to sway in 2016, and I've never looked back. Xorg was nothing but headaches. Let's not even mention its security model.
        • its_ubuntu3 hours ago
          Screen tearing is due to single buffering. Double buffering fixes that. It's easily enabled. This is basic stuff.

          Now thanks to Wayland you have increased latency on top of the screen tearing "fix." Plus all the other Wayland irritations and problems that we've been hearing about for decades (plural) even as we're told the whole time X11 is obsolete. lol.

          Damn it feels good not being a 24/7/365 alpha tester of other people's shitware.

          Enjoy reinventing the wheel, badly, over and over again.

          • nextosan hour ago
            I prefer X11 as well, but it has some security issues. Notably, all applications can read your input at any time. It's really hard to sandbox.

            Wayland brought some irritations, including increased latency, and an architecture that requires rethinking all window managers. A rewrite is not enough. Very annoying.

  • theYipster7 hours 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.
  • miduil8 hours 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.
    • gunalx8 hours ago
      That is exactly the only feature I would like to disable. (have custom theming already)
      • miduil8 hours ago
        Checkout the Settings panel, in the GitHub screencast this feature is shown in the there.
  • arikrahman8 hours 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.

    • arikrahman8 hours ago
      Noctia* Gnome's Nautilus stuck in my mind gahh
      • zerocrates2 hours ago
        It actually is Noctalia; mistake in the HN title.
  • gedy42 minutes 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/

  • Tiberium4 hours ago
    Quite cool that it's possible now to create entire shells with AI-assisted programming
  • Cyphase8 hours ago
    s/Noctia/Noctalia/g
  • gigatexal8 hours 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!