Been using it with Wayfire. It's so lightweight. Barely uses any resources. I switched from XFCE.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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I use it with Niri, please know, the community likes AI at least a few of the plugins are LLMs, doesn't default to giving you AI features, and it's fair to say a lot of commits are AI assisted. Whether or not that's a problem for you is your choice, but it is a problem for me and plan to not use it in the future. Regardless, it gets a tentative recommend from me. Its convenience factor of you just run one program to provide widgets, bar, notification daemon, clipboard manager, and such is really hard to pass up. Moreover, the common design language between all the components is quite nice with the color scheme system they provide working rather well.
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I've been using Noctalia 5 on regular KDE/Plasma for a month or two. Currently it uses 53.9 MiB RAM according to ps_mem.
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 use it together with plasmashell, not as replacement. I rebound "win+space" to trigger Noctalia instead. I use Noctalia as top panel and I use 5 extra KDE panels stylized with panel-colorizer in "dodge windows" mode. To use Noctalia I simply added "noctalia" into normal KDE autostart apps. Noctalia also automatically recognizes KDE/Plasma virtual desktops as workspaces.
Truly the spirit of Linux. "I cobbled together these parts, and it works for me!" Love it.
Do you have a picture of your desktop you could share?
I'm not sure, do you mean wallpaper sauce, or live photo of setup, or more screenshots with apps? I added screenshot to original post soon after posting, but edits can be problematic to sync.
The middle one. Wild setup, I like it!
Thanks! Live photo of it ain't worth sharing at the moment: just a broken external screen, extra macbook on the side, messy wires and some random trash on the table. However, it might be interesting to see how it looks in normal tiling scenarios (I use Krohnkite), and I have a screenshot from few days ago: https://ibb.co/yFgB9kK2 So because those extra KDE panels are "dodge windows", they are usually hidden in non-float layouts and don't take all that space. To see them, instead of hovering to the edge of the screen I usually just switch to empty workspace where they are all visible, and launch something from those panels there, for example a game.
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you don't use Noctalia alongside plasmashell, it just works alongside Kwin so I'm assuming that's what OP meant. Noctalia just replaces your plasmashell.
Nope, I actually use them together, look at other reply.
You can also run Kwin with Noctalia, but it requires some extra work. Not sure if it's worth the effort.
Interesting, hadn't heard of this, though they don't seem to have a stance about LLM contributions.
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.
of course we won’t accept vibecoded slop but we’re not against people getting help from LlM
Hm. I wonder what that means. Every AI project says they won't accept vibecoded slop... and yet...
I'd assume they mean they what Linus does it. Use LLMs to assist with coding, but then verifying the code yourself. Basically, not trying to skimp out on your share of the work, I guess.
Hardest part with that is every script kiddie in the world now thinks they're Linus when using an llm
That means they want people to actually look at the code generated by LLMs and understand how their stuff works so when it breaks they can take responsibility and quickly provide a fix. If your project breaks at 2 am Saturday and the dev that coded is not able to respond to questions on the PR because they don't understand what they wrote it's annoying to deal with.
Thanks for going to the effort to find that, much appreciated!
So not as bad as it could be, but I dearly wish they'd taken a firm stance against it, as literally every DE and 99% of Wayland compositors/window managers use AI now, all save for the handful of WM projects on this list.
Weird, it is tagged as a Permissive AI project in the open slop list, but the URL to the evidence links to an empty search. Maybe they backtracked.
This looks really nice. I see you can create custom plugins in Lua. I haven't seen other Wayland desktop with good plugin system. This looks like it could finally be a good replacement for Awesome WM. I might give it a try.
Afaik, hyprland have decent plugin system, but dev will brake compatibility very often and they change config schema like, every week or so. So yeah, nah.
Could it look close to gnome-shell? And how well does it integrate with all the xdg-desktop stuff?
I am currently using gdm/gnome/PaperWM because I like the comfort of having all the gnome tooling for everyday use. Can the gnome-control-center still be used with Noctalia?
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.
So, I came from Gnome to Niri + Noctalia, and one or the other of the latter read from Gnome's settings. My calendar stuff works great, but that's because I set everything up in Gnome first before later migrating.
I also had an issue with Pipewire video streaming not working on Niri one day (streaming to the internet, not from), and opening Gnome to see if that worked reestablished some xdg-portal config that had gotten lost somehow.
And so I keep Gnome for fear of losing those QoL things in Niri. I dunno if I'd recommend installing it just for that, but maybe that will give you some clues on how to solve your issue!
thx, that certainly informs my decision.
And to be clear, Niri is my daily driver, and I could probably figure out how those details work under the hood, but I don't really have the drive to do that right now.
I love Niri, but it takes a lot of intentional configuration!
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.
thx, that sound promising. I'll have a look at the noctalia control center.
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.
Oh this is very interesting to me. I just scrolled through their plugin store and was really into trying those! I am a long time plasma5 kde or i3/sway user... And I am about to distro hop the desktop pc at work, so maybe I'd check something like this on cachyos
Time to switch to Noctalia I guess.
Yep, I use DankMaterialShell (another Quickshell based project) but its performance is not very good indeed.
Noctalia 5 isn't based on Quickshell.
True, but Noctalia used to be, so now there's more incentive for me to try it out.
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