Dux: Free, open-source Wayland desktop shell with file manager and theming

Been using this for close to a year (wrote about it here when it was still called Dank Material Shell: https://tedium.co/2026/01/29/niri-danklinux-scrolling-window...); it is endlessly slick, and I think good enough to help mainstream Niri.

It also just added official support for atomic distros like Bazzite; it was previously kind of an annoying gap given the popularity of those distros.

I was confused for a second, but turns out DMS rebranded the 'Dank' to 'Dux' a few weeks ago [1]. I've been running DMS + Niri for nearly a year now with no intentions of switching anytime soon. Given how often I've historically changed shells/DEs, this is the ricing equivalent to settling down, getting married, and having kids.

[1] https://duxlabs.dev/blog/v2-0-release

I have been using a pretty basic DWM I customized with the old #! Linux keybindings I love so much for years now. I have been very reluctant to change this setup but Wayland does seem much better these days. I feel I may need to switch up soon. Kinda feels like the end of an era lol.

This looks at lot like Android.

I am not sure how I feel about the curl | sh installation. This seems lile the kind of project which should become part of a Linux distro and thoroughly reviewed before it can be trusted unconditionally.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap My most anticipated development roadmap these days.

DMS is extremely solid but at this point is becoming more all-encompassing than I honestly want

I've been wanting to try Noctalia with this River-based multi-paradigm compositor (which supports DMS) https://github.com/greenm01/triad

I use it daily. There was a learning curve since I was used to GNOME Shell, but Niri and the ability to build my own widgets with QML ended up being the killer features for me. I've built several custom widgets and small apps, and I'm happy with my workflow

I love what these shells do for the linux desktop, but on laptops it makes me bit concerned about battery life. The last time I checked out Dank Material Shell, I saw an impact on power consumption over vanilla Niri.

Great rename, Dux/Tux, keeping the "d" at the start..

Plus, in school the dux is the person who came top of the class.

It's been turning into a very complete desktop env for a while now, surprising it doesn't get talked about more. Glad to see it get exposure on HN.

I'm always surprised by how beautiful these make Linux, but they also turn away from the minimalism I appreciate about my Linux desktop. I'm OK with pulling up a web browser to view the weather! I've historically used a variety of "bars", and being able to tailor them down to "only show me info X" has done wonders for my focus and comprehension.

I think it's great that the year of the Linux Desktop has come and is beautiful, but it's not for me.

Been using this and niri since the inception of both, 0 complaints, 0 maintenance. I had a period(s) of going completely crazy with customizations, tons of dot files, i3, bspwm, way (and other) bars, modules, all of it and I probably forgot 90% of it. and just suddenly I settled on these 2 and kept using it.

I was deciding between DMS and Noctalia; and noctalia's move away from quickshell due to resource usage made me decide on noctalia. But nice to see Dux developing.

Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.

anyone have extended thoughts using this (DMS?) vs Noctalia? i’ve been running a Noctalia fork for like a year now and I’m quite happy with its development. easy to upstream PRs too!

It is so crazy how normal it looks that a random website suggest you to do a "curl -fsSL https://install.duxlabs.dev | sh" to install anything, and most people would stupidly do it without even thinking about it.

Someone coming from 10 to 15 years in a past would think that people are crazy now. And looks like that he would be right when you see the amount of vulnerabilities and stupid breaches like people being pawned just by doing an update with npm or so.

I dont mean to be too pedantic but open source for a linux desktop environment kinda should go without saying?

Rather, I couldn't imagine using a closed source one.

nice project, bad naming :)

if you install it on top of gnome , the design of a show-apps gnome extension i made for myself which is android inspired would fit really nicely with this i think. https://github.com/y0av/cubby

Seems...about the same as Noctalia?

so its a full shell now not just a theme, wonder when it becomes heavy enough that people start wanting something lighter on top of niri

The design language looks heavily ChromeOS-inspired.

Curious to see the difference with Regolith.

How is it for resource use? I tried to make labwc+lxqt work for a low-gpu desktop to free up GPU for local LLM but lxqt is very not good without Openbox and I don't like switching back to X.

(I prefer KDE Plasma generally but it uses more GPU)

looks pretty cool ill give it a try!

Dux is how Mussolini was called under Fascism in Italy, just FYI if the developers are reading.

nice I might switch to this. I'm just using sway and a couple of gnome things clobbled together

This looks like almost like cealistia and its shell

nice

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I went from Omarchy to DMS and then back to Omarchy. IMO, much better overall.