Dux: Free, open-source Wayland desktop shell with file manager and theming | Hacker News Reader

Dux: Free, open-source Wayland desktop shell with file manager and theming

duxlabs.dev

214 pointsindigodaddy64 comments

Been using this for close to a year (wrote about it here when it was still called Dank Material Shell: https://tedium.co/2026/01/29/niri-danklinux-scrolling-window...); it is endlessly slick, and I think good enough to help mainstream Niri.

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.

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.

[1] https://duxlabs.dev/blog/v2-0-release

This looks at lot like Android.

I am not sure how I feel about the curl | sh installation. This seems lile the kind of project which should become part of a Linux distro and thoroughly reviewed before it can be trusted unconditionally.

Piping curl to sh is pretty much always a bad practice.

Yeah, definitely ripped straight from Material Design. That clock widget looks like an exact copy of one from a phone I had.

I assume this project is all vibe-coded?

> I assume this project is all vibe-coded?

You know what happens when you assume, right?

https://github.com/duxlabs-dev/dux-shell?tab=contributing-ov...

Quoting in part from that:

> Using an LLM to help write code is fine. Submitting its output unread is not.

> * You are responsible for every line you submit. You have read it, tested it, and can explain it in review.

> * Say in the PR when a meaningful part of the code was AI generated.

> * Write PR descriptions, issues, and comments yourself. No AI-written or AI-rewritten text. A few plain sentences in your own words beat a page of generated summary. PRs and issues with AI-written text get closed without review.

> ...

> * PRs that read like unreviewed output, with narrating comments, invented APIs, or style that ignores the file they are in, get closed without review.

That looks very clearly non-vibe coded to me. (Also, it's a mature project with 79 releases over the last year and a bit, and 321 contributors.)

As much as I respect the abilities of agentic coding LLMs, I don't think we're yet at the point that you could vibe-code a novel Wayland DE. This is not trivial stuff!

I'm not saying you do this, but I do enjoy complaints about piping cURL to shell when so many people are giving LLMs full access to do whatever they want on their computers.

Sometimes they're the same people such at it is fun seeing the mental gymnastics to draw the line just under one's self.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap My most anticipated development roadmap these days.

Haha, yeah. Once XFCE is fully wayland driven, I will probably be back on xfce.

Agreed, it's the only mainstream desktop with Windows 2000-era ergonomics, which I particularly like. I reluctantly use GNOME now for its better security.

Does KDE not have that? I don't know a lot about this and have just been using whatever DE comes default. Gnome3 does seem like it's trying to be "different," and I remember Gnome2 being more normal.

No, KDE is kind of a mess and is far from the look and feel of classic desktop UIs.

DMS is extremely solid but at this point is becoming more all-encompassing than I honestly want

I've been wanting to try Noctalia with this River-based multi-paradigm compositor (which supports DMS) https://github.com/greenm01/triad

I knee-jerk moved to Noctalia because the Mango functionality was broken (due to config syntax change). Guess is a good opportunity to switch back.

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

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.

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

One problem I have with all these wayland desktops is that they don't work in virtual machines... like at all or very buggy.

I have been using a pretty basic DWM I customized with the old #! Linux keybindings I love so much for years now. I have been very reluctant to change this setup but Wayland does seem much better these days. I feel I may need to switch up soon. Kinda feels like the end of an era lol.

Great rename, Dux/Tux, keeping the "d" at the start..

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'm always surprised by how beautiful these make Linux, but they also turn away from the minimalism I appreciate about my Linux desktop. I'm OK with pulling up a web browser to view the weather! I've historically used a variety of "bars", and being able to tailor them down to "only show me info X" has done wonders for my focus and comprehension.

I think it's great that the year of the Linux Desktop has come and is beautiful, but it's not for me.

If you want to go further, there's Wayland on Android too.

https://denialwm.org/mobile

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.

Yeh that was my biggest issue when trying DMS. What's the reason Quickshell is heavy?

I love what these shells do for the linux desktop, but on laptops it makes me bit concerned about battery life. The last time I checked out Dank Material Shell, I saw an impact on power consumption over vanilla Niri.

Been using this and niri since the inception of both, 0 complaints, 0 maintenance. I had a period(s) of going completely crazy with customizations, tons of dot files, i3, bspwm, way (and other) bars, modules, all of it and I probably forgot 90% of it. and just suddenly I settled on these 2 and kept using it.

It is so crazy how normal it looks that a random website suggest you to do a "curl -fsSL https://install.duxlabs.dev | sh" to install anything, and most people would stupidly do it without even thinking about it.

Someone coming from 10 to 15 years in a past would think that people are crazy now. And looks like that he would be right when you see the amount of vulnerabilities and stupid breaches like people being pawned just by doing an update with npm or so.

People were doing this 10 to 15 years ago too. And the same debates raged on HN.

Eg https://hn.algolia.com/?q=curl+sh

I probably commented in some of those threads too. It sucks being old :(

Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.

anyone have extended thoughts using this (DMS?) vs Noctalia? i’ve been running a Noctalia fork for like a year now and I’m quite happy with its development. easy to upstream PRs too!

depends on when that fork happened. noctalia v5 moved away from quickshell and is way more performant and lightweight than DMS even if a bit more limited in what you can do

i'm constantly rebasing against latest main so i am using v5 indeed! barely used DMS so i'm curious if anyone has specific reasons they prefer one

I dont mean to be too pedantic but open source for a linux desktop environment kinda should go without saying?

Rather, I couldn't imagine using a closed source one.

They exist, for example SteamOS has closed source desktop shell based on Steam client

Was it Caldera that shipped a linux with Motif?

(We're talking three decades ago now)

Their gamescope compositor is free software at least.

Good point, available at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope BSD license

fwiw I can remember all the turmoil when Qt had no free tier and KDE was work of the devil

If you or anyone else want a trip down memory lane around that topic, peppered with some interesting revelations, this video is worth checking out:

KDE: The Documentary — The Story of Free Software Underdogs

https://youtu.be/1Vyzla9mx4g

nice project, bad naming :)

why?

ever heard of an Italian guy named Benito Mussolini?

As I understand it he used "Il Duce"? Which makes this feel like a stretch.

He also used the latin form Dux. (there are statues and motto with that term).

Whatever, just means leader

So does führer

It just means a leader or a guide in latin IIRC

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

Seems...about the same as Noctalia?

so its a full shell now not just a theme, wonder when it becomes heavy enough that people start wanting something lighter on top of niri

The design language looks heavily ChromeOS-inspired.

It's made with Quickshell and "Quickshell is configured in QML, a simple language designed for creating flexible user interfaces." - https://quickshell.org/

It's a design based on Material Design, created by Google and used in Android and Chrome OS, yes

Curious to see the difference with Regolith.

looks pretty cool ill give it a try!

nice I might switch to this. I'm just using sway and a couple of gnome things clobbled together

How is it for resource use? I tried to make labwc+lxqt work for a low-gpu desktop to free up GPU for local LLM but lxqt is very not good without Openbox and I don't like switching back to X.

(I prefer KDE Plasma generally but it uses more GPU)

Dux is how Mussolini was called under Fascism in Italy, just FYI if the developers are reading.

It's also what you call the top student in a school year. I think that waters down the association enough.

This looks like almost like cealistia and its shell

nice

I went from Omarchy to DMS and then back to Omarchy. IMO, much better overall.

Why? I use Omarchy btw

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