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.
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.
Your choice ofcourse but I can pretty much guarantee you won’t be using any software at all anymore in a couple of years.
I know lemmy is very anti AI, but it is not ALL bad if you use it wisely, it is actually really useful if you use it as an assistant and not have it code entire projects for you without oversight.
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.
I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. It’s factually correct that Linux development is LLM assisted. https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
Pretending that it’s the same is disingenuous. What people are arguing for is some level of polish and care.
No idea. Like personally, I am against LLM slop, full stop.
I think the issue is that some people see well managed, human driven, LLM assisted projects can’t delineate it from such slop.
There is a huge difference. Maybe it’s non devs who can only relate to LLM assisted coding threw the lens of slop “AI” non-art?
Somehow people might believe the largest open source software to ever exist has higher reviewing standards than a couple year old vibe coded WM I suppose.
(Saying this as a casual Niri user)
Is Niri vibe coded? Looking at the repo commit history all I see are well thought out proposals, drafts and implementations.
All the evidence points to not vibe coded.
If you don’t believe me I encourage you to look at the repo yourself and judge the work process.
https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
There are definitely vibe coded Niri lua plugins. But that’s not relevant here.
The landing page looks vibe coded but the wm itself doesn’t seem from the first glance
Nah you’re right I’m being a bit of a hater for the hyperbole.
But on a serious note, I think Niri will have a much harder time managing the good-and-bad faith vibe coders they’re calling for, because I think a single dev from Russia does most of the work.
I say limit the vibe coders to plugins.
If you want to work on Niri properly I would go with the human driven/responsible approach that the Linux kernel takes.
I think it’s a matter of building reputation. Like new PR submitters are vetted for violations of the LLM policy strictly. Trusted proved submitters can act with more agency. Just like any other open source project. 🤷♀️
It’s a straw man’s argument. I don’t plan on continuing to use Noctalia because of AI, therefore I shouldn’t use Linux itself? These are two entirely different statements.
Is it problematic that the kernel is developed using AI? Yes, certainly, but that’s not something I have the capacity to deal with at the moment. But why shouldn’t I be allowed to switch to other projects that are stringently anti-AI like River and Quickshell? I will support any open source project that comes with blanket statement against AI usage on the project because I loath it with a vengeance to deep to put into words. But that’s just me, these projects are freely available for anyone to use and if you don’t mind LLM generated code, knock yourself out.
I mean you can switch. NetBSD has a strong no AI policy. I think other BSDs also have a similar policy.
I have read several claims here on Lemmy that people have switched to the BSDs because of their strict no LLM policies.
NetBSD is an open source project that is anti-LLM with blanket statements against LLMs. You should support it.
No straw men involved.
Unless the only things you do are browse and use open source software, you’re out of luck. Even then, lots of open source software assume Linux and break on BSD.
In comparison, you’re not losing much when ditching an LLM WM for a non-LLM WM.
Some hardcore people will go all the way à la Amish, but most will do what they can that doesn’t disrupt their current lifestyle (pls don’t rant abt this im begging you)
AFAIK, FreeBSD is using Mythos to find security vulnerabilities. I have no problem with that.
Perfect use case for LLM assisted work.
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.
Truly the spirit of Linux. “I cobbled together these parts, and it works for me!” Love it.
Do you have a picture of your desktop you could share?
I’m not sure, do you mean wallpaper sauce, or live photo of setup, or more screenshots with apps? I added screenshot to original post soon after posting, but edits can be problematic to sync.
The middle one. Wild setup, I like it!
Crazy stuff
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.
You can also run Kwin with Noctalia, but it requires some extra work. Not sure if it’s worth the effort.
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…
That means they want people to actually look at the code generated by LLMs and understand how their stuff works so when it breaks they can take responsibility and quickly provide a fix. If your project breaks at 2 am Saturday and the dev that coded is not able to respond to questions on the PR because they don’t understand what they wrote it’s annoying to deal with.
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.
Hardest part with that is every script kiddie in the world now thinks they’re Linus when using an llm
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.
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.
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.
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 customized the top bar to resemble Gnome’s. That’s stuff like clock and notifications top-center, control center top-right, using the Cantarell font. It’s definitely not exactly the same. Here’s the config. (It’s written in Nix which generates the Noctalia config file.)
Some Gnome settings configure GTK which apply to GTK windows in non-Gnome window managers. But you wouldn’t be using Gnome’s control center. You’d use a combination of Noctalia’s control center (handles lots of stuff like wifi, bluetooth, audio inputs & outputs) plus the settings system of whichever window manager you use Noctalia with. The WM will manage stuff like display settings, and key bindings.
I think xdg support is mostly managed by the window manager? That’s stuff like screen & sharing, file pickers. I use Niri, and it’s got solid support for that stuff. Some of my favorite Niri features are how it handles screen sharing and privacy.
thx, that sound promising. I’ll have a look at the noctalia control center.
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!
thx, that certainly informs my decision.
And to be clear, Niri is my daily driver, and I could probably figure out how those details work under the hood, but I don’t really have the drive to do that right now.
I love Niri, but it takes a lot of intentional configuration!
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.
Been using it for some time with niri, it’s quite nice and snappier than noctalia 4.
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
Time to switch to Noctalia I guess.
Yep, I use DankMaterialShell (another Quickshell based project) but its performance is not very good indeed.
