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.
I am not sure how I feel about the curl | sh installation. This seems lile the kind of project which should become part of a Linux distro and thoroughly reviewed before it can be trusted unconditionally.
Agreed, it's the only mainstream desktop with Windows 2000-era ergonomics, which I particularly like. I reluctantly use GNOME now for its better security.
Does KDE not have that? I don't know a lot about this and have just been using whatever DE comes default. Gnome3 does seem like it's trying to be "different," and I remember Gnome2 being more normal.
(I say this as someone whose been using KDE for nearly 20 years, and who LOVES KDE).
KDE is GREAT, if: you like tweaking and customizing things. The out-of-the-box KDE is lacking. It's like it wants to be a mix between GNOME's opinionated setup while giving you a lot of flexibility. This means, at least for me, KDE needs a lot of stuff "undone" to get it back to a usable point.
If you hate tweaking, and want something akin to the Win2k UI feel, XFCE will get you there effectively out of the box.
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.
That's awesome, I'm excited to see what you come up with because Umbriel is definitely cool.
I def recommend studying that Triad project: it excites me because it represents the idea that if River had an extra layer on top of you'd have the WM customization potential that normally just comes with building a custom WM or compositor but through config and having Niri/Noctalia/DMS compatibility solved by default
When I moved from x to Wayland; I just moved from my bswpm setup to plasma because I couldn't get similar workflow that I set up in bspwm in either hyprland or sway. Then river entered my radar; but I think the development moved towards becoming a protocol rather than a WM. Nice to see river being used, might give this a try.
I have been using a pretty basic DWM I customized with the old #! Linux keybindings I love so much for years now. I have been very reluctant to change this setup but Wayland does seem much better these days. I feel I may need to switch up soon. Kinda feels like the end of an era lol.
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 love what these shells do for the linux desktop, but on laptops it makes me bit concerned about battery life. The last time I checked out Dank Material Shell, I saw an impact on power consumption over vanilla Niri.
I'm always surprised by how beautiful these make Linux, but they also turn away from the minimalism I appreciate about my Linux desktop. I'm OK with pulling up a web browser to view the weather! I've historically used a variety of "bars", and being able to tailor them down to "only show me info X" has done wonders for my focus and comprehension.
I think it's great that the year of the Linux Desktop has come and is beautiful, but it's not for me.
I was deciding between DMS and Noctalia; and noctalia's move away from quickshell due to resource usage made me decide on noctalia. But nice to see Dux developing.
Been using this and niri since the inception of both, 0 complaints, 0 maintenance. I had a period(s) of going completely crazy with customizations, tons of dot files, i3, bspwm, way (and other) bars, modules, all of it and I probably forgot 90% of it. and just suddenly I settled on these 2 and kept using it.
It is so crazy how normal it looks that a random website suggest you to do a "curl -fsSL https://install.duxlabs.dev | sh" to install anything, and most people would stupidly do it without even thinking about it.
Someone coming from 10 to 15 years in a past would think that people are crazy now. And looks like that he would be right when you see the amount of vulnerabilities and stupid breaches like people being pawned just by doing an update with npm or so.
Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.
anyone have extended thoughts using this (DMS?) vs Noctalia? i’ve been running a Noctalia fork for like a year now and I’m quite happy with its development. easy to upstream PRs too!
depends on when that fork happened. noctalia v5 moved away from quickshell and is way more performant and lightweight than DMS even if a bit more limited in what you can do
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/
How is it for resource use? I tried to make labwc+lxqt work for a low-gpu desktop to free up GPU for local LLM but lxqt is very not good without Openbox and I don't like switching back to X.
(I prefer KDE Plasma generally but it uses more GPU)
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 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
This looks at lot like Android.
I am not sure how I feel about the curl | sh installation. This seems lile the kind of project which should become part of a Linux distro and thoroughly reviewed before it can be trusted unconditionally.
Piping curl to sh is pretty much always a bad practice.
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap My most anticipated development roadmap these days.
Haha, yeah. Once XFCE is fully wayland driven, I will probably be back on xfce.
Agreed, it's the only mainstream desktop with Windows 2000-era ergonomics, which I particularly like. I reluctantly use GNOME now for its better security.
Does KDE not have that? I don't know a lot about this and have just been using whatever DE comes default. Gnome3 does seem like it's trying to be "different," and I remember Gnome2 being more normal.
(I say this as someone whose been using KDE for nearly 20 years, and who LOVES KDE).
KDE is GREAT, if: you like tweaking and customizing things. The out-of-the-box KDE is lacking. It's like it wants to be a mix between GNOME's opinionated setup while giving you a lot of flexibility. This means, at least for me, KDE needs a lot of stuff "undone" to get it back to a usable point.
If you hate tweaking, and want something akin to the Win2k UI feel, XFCE will get you there effectively out of the box.
No, KDE is kind of a mess and is far from the look and feel of classic desktop UIs.
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.
That's awesome, I'm excited to see what you come up with because Umbriel is definitely cool.
I def recommend studying that Triad project: it excites me because it represents the idea that if River had an extra layer on top of you'd have the WM customization potential that normally just comes with building a custom WM or compositor but through config and having Niri/Noctalia/DMS compatibility solved by default
When I moved from x to Wayland; I just moved from my bswpm setup to plasma because I couldn't get similar workflow that I set up in bspwm in either hyprland or sway. Then river entered my radar; but I think the development moved towards becoming a protocol rather than a WM. Nice to see river being used, might give this a try.
I have been using a pretty basic DWM I customized with the old #! Linux keybindings I love so much for years now. I have been very reluctant to change this setup but Wayland does seem much better these days. I feel I may need to switch up soon. Kinda feels like the end of an era lol.
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
Great rename, Dux/Tux, keeping the "d" at the start..
Plus, in school the dux is the person who came top of the class.
It's been turning into a very complete desktop env for a while now, surprising it doesn't get talked about more. Glad to see it get exposure on HN.
I love what these shells do for the linux desktop, but on laptops it makes me bit concerned about battery life. The last time I checked out Dank Material Shell, I saw an impact on power consumption over vanilla Niri.
I'm always surprised by how beautiful these make Linux, but they also turn away from the minimalism I appreciate about my Linux desktop. I'm OK with pulling up a web browser to view the weather! I've historically used a variety of "bars", and being able to tailor them down to "only show me info X" has done wonders for my focus and comprehension.
I think it's great that the year of the Linux Desktop has come and is beautiful, but it's not for me.
If you want to go further, there's Wayland on Android too.
https://denialwm.org/mobile
I was deciding between DMS and Noctalia; and noctalia's move away from quickshell due to resource usage made me decide on noctalia. But nice to see Dux developing.
Yeh that was my biggest issue when trying DMS. What's the reason Quickshell is heavy?
Been using this and niri since the inception of both, 0 complaints, 0 maintenance. I had a period(s) of going completely crazy with customizations, tons of dot files, i3, bspwm, way (and other) bars, modules, all of it and I probably forgot 90% of it. and just suddenly I settled on these 2 and kept using it.
It is so crazy how normal it looks that a random website suggest you to do a "curl -fsSL https://install.duxlabs.dev | sh" to install anything, and most people would stupidly do it without even thinking about it.
Someone coming from 10 to 15 years in a past would think that people are crazy now. And looks like that he would be right when you see the amount of vulnerabilities and stupid breaches like people being pawned just by doing an update with npm or so.
People were doing this 10 to 15 years ago too. And the same debates raged on HN.
Eg https://hn.algolia.com/?q=curl+sh
I probably commented in some of those threads too. It sucks being old :(
Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.
anyone have extended thoughts using this (DMS?) vs Noctalia? i’ve been running a Noctalia fork for like a year now and I’m quite happy with its development. easy to upstream PRs too!
depends on when that fork happened. noctalia v5 moved away from quickshell and is way more performant and lightweight than DMS even if a bit more limited in what you can do
i'm constantly rebasing against latest main so i am using v5 indeed! barely used DMS so i'm curious if anyone has specific reasons they prefer one
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
Was it Caldera that shipped a linux with Motif?
(We're talking three decades ago now)
Their gamescope compositor is free software at least.
fwiw I can remember all the turmoil when Qt had no free tier and KDE was work of the devil
If you or anyone else want a trip down memory lane around that topic, peppered with some interesting revelations, this video is worth checking out:
KDE: The Documentary — The Story of Free Software Underdogs
https://youtu.be/1Vyzla9mx4g
nice project, bad naming :)
why?
ever heard of an Italian guy named Benito Mussolini?
As I understand it he used "Il Duce"? Which makes this feel like a stretch.
He also used the latin form Dux. (there are statues and motto with that term).
Whatever, just means leader
So does führer
It just means a leader or a guide in latin IIRC
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
Seems...about the same as Noctalia?
so its a full shell now not just a theme, wonder when it becomes heavy enough that people start wanting something lighter on top of niri
The design language looks heavily ChromeOS-inspired.
It's made with Quickshell and "Quickshell is configured in QML, a simple language designed for creating flexible user interfaces." - https://quickshell.org/
It's a design based on Material Design, created by Google and used in Android and Chrome OS, yes
Curious to see the difference with Regolith.
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
How is it for resource use? I tried to make labwc+lxqt work for a low-gpu desktop to free up GPU for local LLM but lxqt is very not good without Openbox and I don't like switching back to X.
(I prefer KDE Plasma generally but it uses more GPU)
Dux is how Mussolini was called under Fascism in Italy, just FYI if the developers are reading.
It's also what you call the top student in a school year. I think that waters down the association enough.
This looks like almost like cealistia and its shell
nice
I went from Omarchy to DMS and then back to Omarchy. IMO, much better overall.
Why? I use Omarchy btw