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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

s/Noctia/Noctalia/g

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!