Noctia: A sleek and minimal desktop shell thoughtfully crafted for Wayland | Hacker News Reader

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

github.com

97 pointsdoener43 comments

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?

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.

I have no idea what shell means either! Isn’t it called ricing to customize desktop environment? Since when do people started calling it shell?

I'm not sure about Linux, but on Windows it's been called that since forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell

I wonder where where LiteStep is at

used it (and sometimes SharpE) for a number of years until about idk 20y ago

http://litestep.net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep

https://reddit.com/r/LiteStep/comments/1fjnj9y/litestep_revi...

https://sharpe.sourceforge.net

Noctalia (it's quickshell theme/env underneath) is to compositor as KDE Plasma is to Kwin. Coincidentally both arr built on QtQuick.

Usually a Wayland compositor just do very few things like compose different program windows to your display output and feed the focused window input events. Desktop elements like wallpaper, panel/dock etc are considered part of "desktop shell". Gnome have mutter as compositor and gnome-shell as shell (although they are same process). KDE has Kwin as compositor and plasma-shell as desktop shell.

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....

Personally, I am fine with starting sessions via ssh, don't need extra remote login.

Depends on everybody needs obviously, but say you have your dev machine that is remote, and you want to connect to it from a laptop (for real-estate reason or just for working from everywhere you want), maybe you want everything on the same (remote) machine like browser, db, IDE, etc and access to it as a remote "desktop" not just an ssh session.

Of course cli tools would be enough for somebody who likes a full TUI dev environment (and for my own use cases that would be enough) but for some people I understand the need, and I feel it is a regression for them to not have it.

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

I'm not familiar with the space, but wouldnt something that streams the whole screen like a video (WebRTC or Moonlight and VNC works like this ) work here too as well, and would be universal? Wayland already supports screen capture (into a texture, at interactive framerates) fairly well.

I'd say the problematic part is not capturing the desktop but injecting controls into it. Proper universal support for simulated input is still missing.

I have not used Wayland specifically, but did do this for X11, Windows, Qt, too much stuff to count... It usually takes the form of an api call like

DispatchEvent(&MouseEvent{MOUSE_L, 1345, 3432});

It's almost literally always this

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.

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

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

s/Noctia/Noctalia/g

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.

it doesnt have dotfiles? how fp you sync c(nfig between machibes?

It does habe dotfiles. (.config/noctalia. it is possible to declare mostly declaratively if you want)

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!

DankMaterialShell[0] with catpuccin theme is close to this and way much easier (for me at least) to set up.

[0] https://danklinux.com/

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.

Noctia* Gnome's Nautilus stuck in my mind gahh

It actually is Noctalia; mistake in the HN title.

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

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