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

https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell

47•doener•8h ago

Comments

gigatexal•6h ago

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!

Cyphase•6h ago

s/Noctia/Noctalia/g

miduil•6h ago

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.

gunalx•6h ago

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

miduil•5h ago

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

arikrahman•5h ago

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.

arikrahman•5h ago

Noctia* Gnome's Nautilus stuck in my mind gahh

zerocrates•18m ago

It actually is Noctalia; mistake in the HN title.

while_true_•5h ago

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

its_ubuntu•4h ago

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.

mrln•3h ago

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.

helterskelter•2h ago

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.

its_ubuntu•48m ago

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.

MaxRegret•3h ago

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....

tapoxi•2h ago

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

theYipster•5h ago

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.

dfc•4h ago

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?

dmit•3h ago

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.

Tiberium•1h ago

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

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

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

Comments

Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

List animals until failure

In praise of –dry-run

Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

Cells use 'bioelectricity' to coordinate and make group decisions

pg_tracing: Distributed Tracing for PostgreSQL

Opentrees.org (2024)

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Outsourcing thinking

Best of Moltbook

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Demystifying ARM SME to Optimize General Matrix Multiplications

Apple-1 Computer Prototype Board #0 sold for $2.75M

Nintendo DS code editor and scriptable game engine

Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

Show HN: Minimal – Open-Source Community driven Hardened Container Images

Wikipedia: Sandbox

Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)

Ferrari vs. Markets

CollectWise (YC F24) Is Hiring

Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

EV-1 for Lease (1996)

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