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 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.
Funny you say that, I just started doing specs, planning for a river based compositor based on Niri & Umbriel. After mentioning the idea a couple months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093022
Umbriel is a Niri- like scrolling wm from the Noctalia devs, have really been enjoying it. But I do want something more configurable, easier to play with. And river certainly seems like the main go-to base for that.
Running Noctalia is a must for me. It's a great shell, from a great team. The v5 took a lot of lessons from the past & really spun a very elegant beautiful new user product with a great architecture. Great stuff, not to be missed imo. Happy convert from DMS too.
Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.
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
It's made with Quickshell and "Quickshell is configured in QML, a simple language designed for creating flexible user interfaces." - https://quickshell.org/
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 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 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
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 knee-jerk moved to Noctalia because the Mango functionality was broken (due to config syntax change). Guess is a good opportunity to switch back.
Funny you say that, I just started doing specs, planning for a river based compositor based on Niri & Umbriel. After mentioning the idea a couple months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093022
Umbriel is a Niri- like scrolling wm from the Noctalia devs, have really been enjoying it. But I do want something more configurable, easier to play with. And river certainly seems like the main go-to base for that.
Running Noctalia is a must for me. It's a great shell, from a great team. The v5 took a lot of lessons from the past & really spun a very elegant beautiful new user product with a great architecture. Great stuff, not to be missed imo. Happy convert from DMS too.
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap My most anticipated development roadmap these days.
Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.
Curious to see the difference with Regolith.
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.
They exist, for example SteamOS has closed source desktop shell based on Steam client
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
The design language looks heavily ChromeOS-inspired.
It's a design based on Material Design, created by Google and used in Android and Chrome OS, yes
It's made with Quickshell and "Quickshell is configured in QML, a simple language designed for creating flexible user interfaces." - https://quickshell.org/
looks pretty cool ill give it a try!
nice I might switch to this. I'm just using sway and a couple of gnome things clobbled together
nice project, bad naming :)
why?
ever heard of some Italian guy named Benito Mussolini?