- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
Noctalia is a desktop shell for window managers. Tiling and scrolling window managers (such as i3, MangoWM, Niri, etc.) are only window managers. They don’t have any kind of graphical way to launch applications, there’s no dock, bars or widgets of any kind. They only manage the windows, and you need to provide the rest by installing a number of different applications. Noctalia is a shell that provides a full desktop experience with all the bells and whistles you might expect from full desktop environments like KDE and Gnome.
The previous versions of Noctalia were based on Quickshell which was a memory hog. It used few hundred megabytes of memory per each display you had. Noctalia v5 is a complete rewrite in C++, which especially on multi-monitor systems uses only a fraction of the memory usage compared to Noctalia v4.
I switched from KDE to Niri+Noctalia a few months ago. It’s highly customizable and pleasing looking environment. There are templates for different applications which applies your chosen color theme to applications so that you have unified look across all (or most) of your applications.
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I use it with Niri, please know, the community likes AI at least a few of the plugins are LLMs, doesn’t default to giving you AI features, and it’s fair to say a lot of commits are AI assisted. Whether or not that’s a problem for you is your choice, but it is a problem for me and plan to not use it in the future. Regardless, it gets a tentative recommend from me. Its convenience factor of you just run one program to provide widgets, bar, notification daemon, clipboard manager, and such is really hard to pass up. Moreover, the common design language between all the components is quite nice with the color scheme system they provide working rather well.
I mean if you’re already on Linux you’re already using LLM assisted software. If you are boycotting LLM assisted software you won’t be using Linux anyways.
Been using it for some time with niri, it’s quite nice and snappier than noctalia 4.
Could it look close to gnome-shell? And how well does it integrate with all the xdg-desktop stuff?
I am currently using gdm/gnome/PaperWM because I like the comfort of having all the gnome tooling for everyday use. Can the gnome-control-center still be used with Noctalia?
I use it with niri on debian stable. Works pretty good, no Talia is awesome, but it’s no replacement for a full desktop. One thing that bothers me for example is that the no Talia calendar isn’t actually showing my own calenders events. I didn’t find a way to configure it.
The shell itself is very impressive and probably the best thing if you don’t use a DE.
So, I came from Gnome to Niri + Noctalia, and one or the other of the latter read from Gnome’s settings. My calendar stuff works great, but that’s because I set everything up in Gnome first before later migrating.
I also had an issue with Pipewire video streaming not working on Niri one day (streaming to the internet, not from), and opening Gnome to see if that worked reestablished some xdg-portal config that had gotten lost somehow.
And so I keep Gnome for fear of losing those QoL things in Niri. I dunno if I’d recommend installing it just for that, but maybe that will give you some clues on how to solve your issue!
could it look close? eh maybe. the visual customization of it is still kinda limited. like if you’re looking to have the same customization levels of say Plasmashell you’re out of luck. If you’re ok with the “pill” look then it’s fine but beyond that you couldn’t make it look like say DWM’s bar or what have you. But I suppose if you wanted it to look like cosmic or maybe gnome it’d be more doable since they all kinda share the same principal of “pills are a great look”
As far as if it’ll play nice with GNOME? no clue. I’ve used it with Kwin in the past as a replacement for Plasmashell and it worked fairly well.
I’ve been using Noctalia 5 on regular KDE/Plasma for a month or two. Currently it uses 53.9 MiB RAM according to ps_mem.
Hey could you explain how that works? I thought Noctilia was a replacement shell for plasmashell. How do you use it alongside it? Do you just use the KWin compositor with Noctilia as the actual shell?
I use it together with plasmashell, not as replacement. I rebound “win+space” to trigger Noctalia instead. I use Noctalia as top panel and I use 5 extra KDE panels stylized with panel-colorizer in “dodge windows” mode. To use Noctalia I simply added “noctalia” into normal KDE autostart apps. Noctalia also automatically recognizes KDE/Plasma virtual desktops as workspaces.
Crazy stuff
You can also run Kwin with Noctalia, but it requires some extra work. Not sure if it’s worth the effort.
you don’t use Noctalia alongside plasmashell, it just works alongside Kwin so I’m assuming that’s what OP meant. Noctalia just replaces your plasmashell.
Nope, I actually use them together, look at other reply.
Interesting, hadn’t heard of this, though they don’t seem to have a stance about LLM contributions.
Out of curiosity, what’s noctalia/umbriels takes on ai?
We don’t have any takes, of course we won’t accept vibecoded slop but we’re not against people getting help from LlM
That’s from their Discord. Lysec is one of the main developers of Noctalia Team.
of course we won’t accept vibecoded slop but we’re not against people getting help from LlM
Hm. I wonder what that means. Every AI project says they won’t accept vibecoded slop… and yet…
I’d assume they mean they what Linus does it. Use LLMs to assist with coding, but then verifying the code yourself. Basically, not trying to skimp out on your share of the work, I guess.
Weird, it is tagged as a Permissive AI project in the open slop list, but the URL to the evidence links to an empty search. Maybe they backtracked.
Thanks for going to the effort to find that, much appreciated!
So not as bad as it could be, but I dearly wish they’d taken a firm stance against it, as literally every DE and 99% of Wayland compositors/window managers use AI now, all save for the handful of WM projects on this list.
This looks really nice. I see you can create custom plugins in Lua. I haven’t seen other Wayland desktop with good plugin system. This looks like it could finally be a good replacement for Awesome WM. I might give it a try.
Afaik, hyprland have decent plugin system, but dev will brake compatibility very often and they change config schema like, every week or so. So yeah, nah.
Time to switch to Noctalia I guess.
Oh this is very interesting to me. I just scrolled through their plugin store and was really into trying those! I am a long time plasma5 kde or i3/sway user… And I am about to distro hop the desktop pc at work, so maybe I’d check something like this on cachyos
