noctalia

Noctalia is a native Wayland desktop shell aimed at users who want a polished, configurable Linux desktop without assembling a separate bar, launcher, notification daemon, lock screen, wallpaper tool and settings UI. It provides the shell layer around your compositor: bars, widgets, dock, launcher, control center, notifications, wallpaper, lock screen, session actions, clipboard history, OSDs, tray integration and desktop widgets. The project is built directly on Wayland and OpenGL ES with no Qt or GTK dependency, so UI, rendering, configuration and IPC are designed as one cohesive shell rather than a collection of unrelated panels and scripts. What it includes: - Multi-monitor bars with configurable widgets, taskbar, workspaces, system tray, media, network, battery, brightness, weather, clipboard and custom script-backed widgets. - Dock, launcher, control center, notification toasts/history, wallpaper picker, OSD overlays, lock screen, session panel and desktop widgets. - TOML configuration with hot reload, GUI-managed overrides, theme/palette support, template application and IPC for runtime control. - Direct Wayland integration for layer-shell, session lock, idle behavior, clipboard, foreign toplevels, workspaces, fractional scaling and compositor-specific workspace backends where needed. Compositor support: Noctalia works with Wayland compositors providing the layer-shell protocols it needs. Workspace integration uses compositor-native backends or ext-workspace-v1 where implemented. Current integrations include Niri, Hyprland, Sway, Scroll, Mango, Labwc, Triad, dwl and other compatible compositors; others may run with reduced workspace, window, output or session-action integration depending on exposed protocols and IPC. Scope: Noctalia is a desktop shell, not a full desktop environment. Window management, tiling, compositor configuration, file management, removable-drive mounting, printers and screen mirroring/casting belong to the compositor, dedicated applications or system services. Display/login greeter support lives in the separate Noctalia Greeter project. Core Noctalia is non-invasive: it does not manage compositor settings or take over dotfiles; compositor-specific controls can be opt-in plugins. A plugin system supports user-installed extensions such as extra bar widgets, launcher providers, desktop widgets, panels, shortcuts, background services, compositor-specific extras and third-party integrations. Configuration and building: a ready-to-use starting config with all defaults is provided as example.toml, with the full reference on the documentation site and source MDX files under docs/user/. Source dependencies, distro-specific package commands, build modes and install layouts are documented in BUILDING.md; packaging notes are in PACKAGING.md; developer notes, architecture, code style and debugging commands are in CONTRIBUTING.md. The project is MIT licensed.