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

61 points

by doener

11 hours ago

| past

| 9 comments

| github.com

| HN

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dfc

6 hours ago

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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?

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dmit

5 hours ago

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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.

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miduil

8 hours ago

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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.

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gunalx

8 hours ago

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

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miduil

8 hours ago

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

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theYipster

7 hours ago

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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.

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while_true_

7 hours ago

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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

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MaxRegret

5 hours ago

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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....

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tapoxi

5 hours ago

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

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its_ubuntu

6 hours ago

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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.

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mrln

6 hours ago

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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.

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helterskelter

5 hours ago

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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.

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its_ubuntu

3 hours ago

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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.

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helterskelter

9 minutes ago

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You can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearing is something you'll notice every time it happens, whereas latency is not something that's necessarily an issue, and modern compositors have minimized this.

I'm not really sure why Wayland gets all the hate it does, you'd think desktop Linux was perfect before Wayland came along and made everything totally unusable. As for myself, it's been a much better experience than Xorg ever was, pretty much since day one -- I've never had a torn frame, I've never had any issues with input lag, and I've never had to fuss with video settings. Not once. I'm sure somebody has but across a dozen machines I've had exactly zero problems in a few months shy of a decade.

Let's not forget Xorg's own devs have put it on life support and recommend Wayland, which was created by Xorg devs, going forward. Nobody wants to maintain 35-year old spaghetti code of a fundamentally flawed design.

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nextos

1 hour ago

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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.

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stonogo

36 minutes ago

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I will never understand why "the computer can tell what input it is receiving" has turned into an accepted threat model.

I understand that we have built a computer where our primary interface depends on running untrusted code from random remote locations, but it is absolutely incredible to me that the response to that is to fundamentally cripple basic functionality instead of fixing the actual problem.

We have chosen to live in a world where the software we run cannot be trusted to run on our computers, and we'd rather break our computers than make another choice. Absolutely baffling state of affairs.

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arikrahman

8 hours ago

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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.

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arikrahman

8 hours ago

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Noctia* Gnome's Nautilus stuck in my mind gahh

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zerocrates

2 hours ago

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It actually is Noctalia; mistake in the HN title.

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