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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

they have a gallery here: https://noctalia.dev/#spotlight