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.
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.
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
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 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.
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/
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.
[1] https://duxlabs.dev/blog/v2-0-release
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've been wanting to try Noctalia with this River-based multi-paradigm compositor (which supports DMS) https://github.com/greenm01/triad
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.
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
Rather, I couldn't imagine using a closed source one.