Yet another Hacker News

Dux: Free, open-source Wayland desktop shell with file manager and theming

63 points indigodaddy 1 hour ago 21 comments

tarpitt 1 hour ago | parent

nice I might switch to this. I'm just using sway and a couple of gnome things clobbled together

nylonstrung 1 hour ago | parent

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

hxii 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

jauntywundrkind 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

andxor 55 minutes ago | parent

The design language looks heavily ChromeOS-inspired.

irq-1 47 minutes ago | parent

It's made with Quickshell and "Quickshell is configured in QML, a simple language designed for creating flexible user interfaces." - https://quickshell.org/

ashenke 40 minutes ago | parent

It's a design based on Material Design, created by Google and used in Android and Chrome OS, yes

m0op 52 minutes ago | parent

looks pretty cool ill give it a try!

m0op 42 minutes ago | parent

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

jeffnash 42 minutes ago | parent

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

darkwi11ow 41 minutes ago | parent

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap My most anticipated development roadmap these days.

mariocesar 35 minutes ago | parent

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

aw4y 33 minutes ago | parent

nice project, bad naming :)

hmokiguess 25 minutes ago | parent

why?

Tox46 15 minutes ago | parent

ever heard of an Italian guy named Benito Mussolini?

toddmorey 32 minutes ago | parent

Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.

maelito 26 minutes ago | parent

Curious to see the difference with Regolith.

miladyincontrol 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

darkwi11ow 22 minutes ago | parent

They exist, for example SteamOS has closed source desktop shell based on Steam client

shortformblog 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

bashhq_r 6 minutes ago | parent

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