I used to always bounce back and forth between Gnome, Plasma, Sway and Hyprland.
I love tiling compositors, but I also love having a fully functional desktop without stitching together two dozen different tools and configuring each separately. I got better things to do than edit text files for days.
And I think I found my holy grail: niri with Dank Material Shell.
DMS really is something else. A fully-fledged DE that sits on top of a tiling wayland compositor, with a workflow similar to Gnome and GUI customization options similar to Plasma.
I realize I’m shilling hard here, but I don’t even know the guy who made it. I’m just genuinely floored by the project’s quality.
This isn’t reddit. Self promotion isn’t disallowed because we don’t have ads
ZIrconium is a cool Bootc with Niri “distro” https://zirconium.gay/
Niri is awesome, but I cannot stand DMS with how often it completely changes the base setup and breaks my configs. The generated json dotfiles are also a mess, impossible to work with outside of their GUI. My friend tried it and switched to Noctalia, and he’s much happier. I’m probably just going back to Waybar or something simpler, but that’s just personal preference
I followed the same path as OP and your friend in the last week. I settled with Niri and Noctalia and am very happy.
The heretic rejects the truth of KDE Plasma! Burn them!
With the sarcasm now out of my system, I will definitely give this a try. Thank you for the tip. The tiling feature in COSMIC is amazing, but the rest of the environment is still rough. I would love to see more like that.
this is an insanely professional-looking project, the (potential) vibed-ness notwithstanding. sadly, unless there’s some post describing what for and how claude & friends is used, not even thinking of touching that.
I hate to be that guy but dev is vibe coding it. Check the .gitignore
I don’t know what that is or how to check it, and frankly I don’t care that much if they’re using AI.
I didn’t notice any bugs so far and I’m not relying on it for mission-critical work.
If I boycotted everything that’s made with AI help, I’d have to go back to Slackware.You probably couldn’t boycott everything made with LLMs even if you went back to slackware. Firefox devs use it too (and for the love of god, no one attack the dev for it).
I don’t like it, consider it a liability, mentioned it to those who might care. I do appreciate your post nonetheless, not my cup of tea as an environment but I still liked the post.
There’s plenty of DEs made without AI slop.
AI is in the tool chain now whether you want it or not.
People who don’t use new tools get stuck behind.
If you find a carpenter who is bashing his nails in with a rock because he doesn’t trust hammers, or because blacksmithing is bad for the environment, you are going to be dealing with a shitty carpenter who is a lot slower and less effective than one who learned how to use a hammer.
The genie is out of the bottle. That much is not changing. Accept it, or be a Luddite. Quite literally, because that term comes from people who refused to accept that machines were taking over textile work.
Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.
The irony here is that the Luddites used machines. Nobody was weaving by hand in those days. Their grievance was not with machines in and of themselves, but with the machines being used to create an inferior product and oppress workers. Do you see the connection?
AI is in the tool chain now whether you want it or not.
I don’t understand what this is even supposed to mean? Because there are AI tools, you’re forced to use them? Nah.
People who don’t use new tools get stuck behind.
Nah. People who use AI slop churn out slop. People who actually write good code don’t use that shit at all because it just delays their progress.
you are going to be dealing with a shitty carpenter who is a lot slower and less effective than one who learned how to use a hammer.
A hammer doesn’t go around the house smashing windows as it builds the house. Its wielded by the carpenter and does exactly what they make it do.
The genie is out of the bottle.
Again, what is this supposed to mean?
AI is not a tool. A tool does what its wielder makes it do. AI just fucking wings it and makes shit up constantly and is wrong constantly.
I have heard this with NFTs, before that with crypto (and a dozen other more specific technologies before). It’s a terrible attitude.
No one has to accept shit even if it’s entrenched (see my other comment).
Thank you for bringing this up! But, while you’ve clearly pointed out where to look at, it wasn’t quite enough for me to understand what exact content gave it away. Was it
- short/brief .gitignore?
- /target?
- /result?
- Any combination of the above?
I desire to learn this in the hopes of improving my vibe-code radar.
It wasn’t just the .gitignore to be honest, just a set of “rules” I have on a script I use to analyze repos (I may publish it eventually, although it would quickly become worthless plus it’s used at work to vet dependencies) and then just manual review of commits.
Ah, okay. I was looking at niri’s .gitignore 😅. But yeah, I can see it now. Thanks again!
Are you referring to the CLAUDE files?
Would it work on BSD?
Maybe. Its only hard dependency is quickshell, which seems to be available for FreeBSD: https://github.com/charlesrocket/quickshell/tree/fbsd
It doesn’t depend on systemd.
But I’d be very surprised if it works as intended out of the box without some fiddling.
In any case, you’d have to install it manually. The provided scripts are only for Linux.
No such thing as an unpaid ad. Ads necessarily require payment. Thanks for sharing.
Noctalia is another quickshell implementation that I’ve been using with Niri and I like it a lot.
I’ve been loving Niri!! It feels like how my brain organizes my thoughts. Plus there’s some subtle things I love. Like user set window size is always respected when opening and resizing other windows or the built in screenshot tool.
I have also been recommended River multiple times and it also sounds very interesting so I’ll be checking that out at some point, but I think Niri will be my home for a while.
Off topic but Berm Peak is awesome.
Best bike channel
Best mountain biking channel. There are others that are better for other types of biking (e.g. Shifter for utility cycling).
That’s a weird-looking mountain bike in the thumbnail…
It’s two penny-farthings welded together back-to-back. It’s a freakbike for doing stunt-riding, which is still way closer to stuff like mountain biking and bmx than it is to ‘normal’ utility or road cycling.
And yes, he also owns a couple of Bromptons and has made the very occasional video on urban cycling. But that doesn’t make him the best channel for it. I’m not throwing shade on the guy; I’m just saying it’s just not his focus.
(He also doesn’t cover stuff like, say, pro cycling or MAMIL-style road cycling. I hesitate to mention GCN 'cause I think I’d get flamed if I called them the “best” at anything, but they definitely cover those topics more than Seth does.)
The point is, he covers a lot more than just mountain bikes.
The industry is moving to 32" wheels now.
He’s just ahead of the curve.
Nice tip, I’ll check out the setup once niri merges the per-device settings.
You can also combine dms with hyprland or sway if you like those better.
how is resource consumption? how is the hardware you are running it on?
It uses 1.2GB of RAM compared to 800MB for niri without dms, and idles at 5% CPU load.
I run it on an 8-year-old Thinkpad E480 with an i5-8250U and 16GB RAM.
That looks pretty nice! Next time I play around, I’ll have to try that. I’ve got Cinnamon dialed in pretty well at the moment on my main desktop. And I finally got LXQt, Openbox, and Picom to a state I’m happy with on my turd of a laptop. Can you put the panel on the bottom?
Yes, click on the clock, then Settings -> Dankbar -> Settings -> Position -> Bottom
DMS is indeed great! It works also great with Hyprland for anyone interested.
