Noctia: A sleek and minimal desktop shell thoughtfully crafted for Wayland
(github.com)51 points by doener 10 hours ago
51 points by doener 10 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.
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
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....
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.
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.
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.
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irritations and problems that we've been hearing about for decades (plural) even as we're told the whole time X11 is obsolete.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.
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.
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!
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?