I got good recommendations for desktop shells on my other posts. I looked at Noctalia and DankMaterialShell, they both are built on top of QuickShell. QuckShell is a framework for writing widgets in QML, it wasn't made until 2024. both Noctalia and DMS were made during the summer (all these dates looking at Github). They basically became popular over night.

I was looking at ricing during the spring and didn't find anything as developed or popular. I had a bunch of tabs open for AGS & Astal, but didn't find complete shells built on them. It seems like I would've had to start from scratch if I wanted an exact rice, but now I can edit pre-made QMLs instead.

This actually seems like the best time for linux ricing yet.