At first I thought "desktop shell" was supposed to be compositor, but that's not the case, a wayland compositor like sway is a requirement. I've been using sway for years I have no idea what a "shell" is? It's somewhere in between a desktop environment and a theme?
Yes. It occupies the spot in the Sway tutorials that recommend you "waybar, fuzzel, tofi, [etc]" to fill out the necessities. Noctalia, DMS, and other Quickshell projects cover that void.
You probably know this already, but the problem isn't remote desktop into a logged-in session (krdp supports this) but rather logging in remotely into a headless server without a local session running. This is slightly more complicated because the login manager has to get involved and present its UI remotely. This is what that bug is tracking.
Depends on everybody needs obviously, but say you have your dev machine that is remote, and you want to connect to it from a laptop (for real-estate reason or just for working from everywhere you want), maybe you want everything on the same (remote) machine like browser, db, IDE, etc and access to it as a remote "desktop" not just an ssh session.
Of course cli tools would be enough for somebody who likes a full TUI dev environment (and for my own use cases that would be enough) but for some people I understand the need, and I feel it is a regression for them to not have it.
I'm not familiar with the space, but wouldnt something that streams the whole screen like a video (WebRTC or Moonlight and VNC works like this ) work here too as well, and would be universal? Wayland already supports screen capture (into a texture, at interactive framerates) fairly well.
I'd say the problematic part is not capturing the desktop but injecting controls into it. Proper universal support for simulated input is still missing.
This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious. You might not like wayland and that's fine with me, but if you decide to hate on it, you should at least know what you are hating on. There are good reasons to prefer a wayland compositor over X11. If you don't care about these reasons, that doesn't mean nobody should.
Wayland got rid of screen tearing, an issue that plagued every machine I had used with X since I started using Linux in 2003/2004. That alone was enough for me to switch to sway in 2016, and I've never looked back. Xorg was nothing but headaches. Let's not even mention its security model.
Screen tearing is due to single buffering. Double buffering fixes that. It's easily enabled. This is basic stuff.
Now thanks to Wayland you have increased latency on top of the screen tearing "fix." Plus all the other Wayland irritations and problems that we've been hearing about for decades (plural) even as we're told the whole time X11 is obsolete. lol.
Damn it feels good not being a 24/7/365 alpha tester of other people's shitware.
Enjoy reinventing the wheel, badly, over and over again.
You can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearing is something you'll notice every time it happens, whereas latency is not something that's necessarily an issue, and modern compositors have substantially reduced this latency.
I'm not really sure why Wayland gets all the hate it does, you'd think desktop Linux was perfect before Wayland came along and made everything totally unusable. As for myself, it's been a much better experience than Xorg ever was, pretty much since day one -- I've never had a torn frame, I've never had any issues with input lag, and I've never had to fuss with video settings. Not once. I'm sure some people have, but across a dozen machines I've had exactly zero problems in...a few months shy of a decade.
Let's not forget Xorg's own devs have put it on life support and recommend Wayland, which was created by Xorg devs, going forward. Nobody wants to maintain 35-year old spaghetti code of a fundamentally flawed design.
Want to know how I know you've never once even looked at the X11 source code before pronouncing it "spaghetti code"?
Just repeat what you're told. It's what everyone else does.
I watch videos all the time on X11. With double buffering enabled, there is no screen tearing. It's fine. I have a 12 year old video card. Not exactly new tech.
You've replaced one "fundamentally flawed design" with another one, in the name of addressing petty, exaggerated concerns. This happens all the time these days. Nobody questions anything because most of you have fundamentally lost the ability to actually think. Repeating pre-packaged slogans, taglines, and catch phrases is about all anyone can do anymore.
I've heard all the nonsensical arguments in "favor" of Wayland and I see through all of them, exactly as I saw through systemd, pulseaudio, and all the other garbage that keeps getting shoved down everyone's throat. I'm not the only one. We're not using any of this shit.
We are computer programmers. We can maintain it and keep it going our damn selves. Really, there's not much work needed. X11 just keeps going, and going, and going, like the Energizer bunny. Maybe one day Wayland will have remote desktop support. lol
It's own devs have put it on life support because fixing the problems inherent to its design is not doable without breaking everything that works with it. I don't know what more justification you could want.
Go work on Xorg if you like, but that ship has sailed.
If that's all it were--just some devs off in their corner coming up with a new thing that they think is better, slowly and organically gathering up a following as the tech proves itself, that would be great. I'd be all about it.
But when a flood of opinionated zealots starts arriving on my doorstep preaching the Good News of how all my working tech is now obsolete because of ${nonsense}, telling lie after lie and exaggerating X11's flaws while minimizing those of Wayland, for decades--even as we're subjected to a steady stream of complaints about this shitware they've foisted upon us--and dismissing the holdouts as backwards old fogeys stuck in the past (same playbook they always use), then I take great exception to all this. I'm happy to fire back with both barrels.
X11 is obsolete? Not on your life.
I'm completely open to forking it, and have already resolved to do so when time permits to work on it. Why not? I already forked half a dozen other major projects for similar reasons, up to and including the kernel itself. I'm sick and tired of the shitware.
I'll devise a non-backwards-compatible fix for the security issues that only breaks things exactly as much as is needed, with tradeoffs that I feel comfortable with, then deploy it on all my systems, and soldier on without a backwards glance. Middle finger raised.
(Who is Wayland again? Is that Linux Puttering's hillbilly cousin from New Jersey? Never heard of the guy. Doesn't sound like the type of character I want hanging around my system.)
Out of curiosity, are you using nvidia? Which drivers are you using? I've never experienced this issue with an Intel or AMD graphics, even on a budget laptop.
I prefer X11 as well, but it has some security issues. Notably, all applications can read your input at any time. It's really hard to sandbox.
Wayland brought some irritations, including increased latency, and an architecture that requires rethinking all window managers. A rewrite is not enough. Very annoying.
I will never understand why "the computer can tell what input it is receiving" has turned into an accepted threat model.
I understand that we have built a computer where our primary interface depends on running untrusted code from random remote locations, but it is absolutely incredible to me that the response to that is to fundamentally cripple basic functionality instead of fixing the actual problem.
We have chosen to live in a world where the software we run cannot be trusted to run on our computers, and we'd rather break our computers than make another choice. Absolutely baffling state of affairs.
Defense in depth. One compromised application may do a lot of harm if it has access to your keyboard inputs. Supply chain attacks are not that uncommon. While you can trust software developers, you cannot completely trust their builds.
Agreed, which is why I build everything from source, but even that is not sufficient as there's no way to audit all that code at this time or for many years to come.
The X11 keylogger problem is a serious issue, however, I do not agree with transitioning to a completely new and different system (especially one designed like Wayland is) rather than just doing a backwards-incompatible "version 2.0 protocol" type fix and moving on.
We could have done this in 2005 and been long past this by now. Why not? Failed leadership. Same thing with 64-bit time, and plenty of other stuff.
And when someone violates that trust, do you then tear the house down and build one with only external doors, requiring inhabitants to circle in the yard to move between rooms? The point of the Wayland security model is that the inhabitants of the house do not trust each other, and the architecture of the house must change to accommodate that.
I'm not impressed with the analogy. I am not confused about the goals of Wayland's security model. I am dismayed at the poor judgment elsewhere in computing that has led to its necessity.
I could have done without the "any stranger can run foreign code on my machine" bit, personally. I'm OK with doing away with Javascript forever, along with the whole "my computer just randomly downloads binary code silently in the background at intervals of its choosing" (aka "critical updates") that then becomes seen as a necessity.
Nobody needed constant code updates streaming to their PC in the BBS days when it was just ANSI or RipScript over a TTY. With complicated HTML/XML parsers the game started changing. Then Javascript came along and opened the posterior doors wide open.
Wow, Noctalia looks amazing! I'm especially excited about the automatic theme by background image, that means my live updating wallpaper also tweaks the theme :) super fun.
I’ve been trying out both DMS and Noctalia in separate VMs this week (both on Niri.) I like them both. Noctalia seems a bit more refined out of the box. DMS is more customizable. I foresee both taking over from .dotfile packs (and maybe even Omarchy) as better ways to bootstrap a Nir or Hyprland.
I don't know, dank-material-shell fills the same niche, and works better on NixOS out of the box, making it easier to setup while highly configurable. It seems broader than Noctalia in scope as well, so there are more components and they play nicer with each other.
Noctalia seems like it would fit more slimmer builds that want to move away from waybar.
At first I thought "desktop shell" was supposed to be compositor, but that's not the case, a wayland compositor like sway is a requirement. I've been using sway for years I have no idea what a "shell" is? It's somewhere in between a desktop environment and a theme?
Yes. It occupies the spot in the Sway tutorials that recommend you "waybar, fuzzel, tofi, [etc]" to fill out the necessities. Noctalia, DMS, and other Quickshell projects cover that void.
I have no idea what shell means either! Isn’t it called ricing to customize desktop environment? Since when do people started calling it shell?
I'm not sure about Linux, but on Windows it's been called that since forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell
I wonder where where LiteStep is at
used it (and sometimes SharpE) for a number of years until about idk 20y ago
http://litestep.net
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep
https://reddit.com/r/LiteStep/comments/1fjnj9y/litestep_revi...
https://sharpe.sourceforge.net
Still using X11, so no Noctia for me. Patiently waiting for somebody/someone to get remote desktop on Wayland. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481912
You probably know this already, but the problem isn't remote desktop into a logged-in session (krdp supports this) but rather logging in remotely into a headless server without a local session running. This is slightly more complicated because the login manager has to get involved and present its UI remotely. This is what that bug is tracking.
If you're happy to use Gnome with GDM as the login manager, remote headless sessions are supported already with gnome-remote-desktop: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless....
Personally, I am fine with starting sessions via ssh, don't need extra remote login.
Depends on everybody needs obviously, but say you have your dev machine that is remote, and you want to connect to it from a laptop (for real-estate reason or just for working from everywhere you want), maybe you want everything on the same (remote) machine like browser, db, IDE, etc and access to it as a remote "desktop" not just an ssh session.
Of course cli tools would be enough for somebody who likes a full TUI dev environment (and for my own use cases that would be enough) but for some people I understand the need, and I feel it is a regression for them to not have it.
I'm not familiar with the space, but wouldnt something that streams the whole screen like a video (WebRTC or Moonlight and VNC works like this ) work here too as well, and would be universal? Wayland already supports screen capture (into a texture, at interactive framerates) fairly well.
I'd say the problematic part is not capturing the desktop but injecting controls into it. Proper universal support for simulated input is still missing.
This is something implemented by the compositor, so with KDE this may be addressed by the new Plasma Login Manager. GNOME already supports this.
Isn't it great how we just keep reinventing the same old wheel over and over and over again?
A light weight, minimal window manager for Wayland! How nice! We already had a hundred of those for X11.
This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious. You might not like wayland and that's fine with me, but if you decide to hate on it, you should at least know what you are hating on. There are good reasons to prefer a wayland compositor over X11. If you don't care about these reasons, that doesn't mean nobody should.
> This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious.
So what exactly is a "shell" ?
UNIX people call it a window manager; Windows people call it a shell.
Wayland got rid of screen tearing, an issue that plagued every machine I had used with X since I started using Linux in 2003/2004. That alone was enough for me to switch to sway in 2016, and I've never looked back. Xorg was nothing but headaches. Let's not even mention its security model.
Screen tearing is due to single buffering. Double buffering fixes that. It's easily enabled. This is basic stuff.
Now thanks to Wayland you have increased latency on top of the screen tearing "fix." Plus all the other Wayland irritations and problems that we've been hearing about for decades (plural) even as we're told the whole time X11 is obsolete. lol.
Damn it feels good not being a 24/7/365 alpha tester of other people's shitware.
Enjoy reinventing the wheel, badly, over and over again.
You can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearing is something you'll notice every time it happens, whereas latency is not something that's necessarily an issue, and modern compositors have substantially reduced this latency.
I'm not really sure why Wayland gets all the hate it does, you'd think desktop Linux was perfect before Wayland came along and made everything totally unusable. As for myself, it's been a much better experience than Xorg ever was, pretty much since day one -- I've never had a torn frame, I've never had any issues with input lag, and I've never had to fuss with video settings. Not once. I'm sure some people have, but across a dozen machines I've had exactly zero problems in...a few months shy of a decade.
Let's not forget Xorg's own devs have put it on life support and recommend Wayland, which was created by Xorg devs, going forward. Nobody wants to maintain 35-year old spaghetti code of a fundamentally flawed design.
Want to know how I know you've never once even looked at the X11 source code before pronouncing it "spaghetti code"?
Just repeat what you're told. It's what everyone else does.
I watch videos all the time on X11. With double buffering enabled, there is no screen tearing. It's fine. I have a 12 year old video card. Not exactly new tech.
You've replaced one "fundamentally flawed design" with another one, in the name of addressing petty, exaggerated concerns. This happens all the time these days. Nobody questions anything because most of you have fundamentally lost the ability to actually think. Repeating pre-packaged slogans, taglines, and catch phrases is about all anyone can do anymore.
I've heard all the nonsensical arguments in "favor" of Wayland and I see through all of them, exactly as I saw through systemd, pulseaudio, and all the other garbage that keeps getting shoved down everyone's throat. I'm not the only one. We're not using any of this shit.
We are computer programmers. We can maintain it and keep it going our damn selves. Really, there's not much work needed. X11 just keeps going, and going, and going, like the Energizer bunny. Maybe one day Wayland will have remote desktop support. lol
It's own devs have put it on life support because fixing the problems inherent to its design is not doable without breaking everything that works with it. I don't know what more justification you could want.
Go work on Xorg if you like, but that ship has sailed.
And keeps sailing, and sailing, and sailing.
Like I said, the great thing about X11 is I don't have to work on it. It just works.
why do you care that much that other people "reinvent the wheel"?
A fair question, given the context.
If that's all it were--just some devs off in their corner coming up with a new thing that they think is better, slowly and organically gathering up a following as the tech proves itself, that would be great. I'd be all about it.
But when a flood of opinionated zealots starts arriving on my doorstep preaching the Good News of how all my working tech is now obsolete because of ${nonsense}, telling lie after lie and exaggerating X11's flaws while minimizing those of Wayland, for decades--even as we're subjected to a steady stream of complaints about this shitware they've foisted upon us--and dismissing the holdouts as backwards old fogeys stuck in the past (same playbook they always use), then I take great exception to all this. I'm happy to fire back with both barrels.
X11 is obsolete? Not on your life.
I'm completely open to forking it, and have already resolved to do so when time permits to work on it. Why not? I already forked half a dozen other major projects for similar reasons, up to and including the kernel itself. I'm sick and tired of the shitware.
I'll devise a non-backwards-compatible fix for the security issues that only breaks things exactly as much as is needed, with tradeoffs that I feel comfortable with, then deploy it on all my systems, and soldier on without a backwards glance. Middle finger raised.
(Who is Wayland again? Is that Linux Puttering's hillbilly cousin from New Jersey? Never heard of the guy. Doesn't sound like the type of character I want hanging around my system.)
> latency is not something that's necessarily an issue
Of course it is not. Especially when GUI elements are black, waiting for the next, or other, frame. (hello Microsoft).
Out of curiosity, are you using nvidia? Which drivers are you using? I've never experienced this issue with an Intel or AMD graphics, even on a budget laptop.
I prefer X11 as well, but it has some security issues. Notably, all applications can read your input at any time. It's really hard to sandbox.
Wayland brought some irritations, including increased latency, and an architecture that requires rethinking all window managers. A rewrite is not enough. Very annoying.
I will never understand why "the computer can tell what input it is receiving" has turned into an accepted threat model.
I understand that we have built a computer where our primary interface depends on running untrusted code from random remote locations, but it is absolutely incredible to me that the response to that is to fundamentally cripple basic functionality instead of fixing the actual problem.
We have chosen to live in a world where the software we run cannot be trusted to run on our computers, and we'd rather break our computers than make another choice. Absolutely baffling state of affairs.
Defense in depth. One compromised application may do a lot of harm if it has access to your keyboard inputs. Supply chain attacks are not that uncommon. While you can trust software developers, you cannot completely trust their builds.
Agreed, which is why I build everything from source, but even that is not sufficient as there's no way to audit all that code at this time or for many years to come.
The X11 keylogger problem is a serious issue, however, I do not agree with transitioning to a completely new and different system (especially one designed like Wayland is) rather than just doing a backwards-incompatible "version 2.0 protocol" type fix and moving on.
We could have done this in 2005 and been long past this by now. Why not? Failed leadership. Same thing with 64-bit time, and plenty of other stuff.
I have doors between rooms in my house, despite its being inhabited by members of the same family who trust each other.
And when someone violates that trust, do you then tear the house down and build one with only external doors, requiring inhabitants to circle in the yard to move between rooms? The point of the Wayland security model is that the inhabitants of the house do not trust each other, and the architecture of the house must change to accommodate that.
I'm not impressed with the analogy. I am not confused about the goals of Wayland's security model. I am dismayed at the poor judgment elsewhere in computing that has led to its necessity.
I could have done without the "any stranger can run foreign code on my machine" bit, personally. I'm OK with doing away with Javascript forever, along with the whole "my computer just randomly downloads binary code silently in the background at intervals of its choosing" (aka "critical updates") that then becomes seen as a necessity.
Nobody needed constant code updates streaming to their PC in the BBS days when it was just ANSI or RipScript over a TTY. With complicated HTML/XML parsers the game started changing. Then Javascript came along and opened the posterior doors wide open.
Wow, Noctalia looks amazing! I'm especially excited about the automatic theme by background image, that means my live updating wallpaper also tweaks the theme :) super fun.
That is exactly the only feature I would like to disable. (have custom theming already)
Checkout the Settings panel, in the GitHub screencast this feature is shown in the there.
s/Noctia/Noctalia/g
I’ve been trying out both DMS and Noctalia in separate VMs this week (both on Niri.) I like them both. Noctalia seems a bit more refined out of the box. DMS is more customizable. I foresee both taking over from .dotfile packs (and maybe even Omarchy) as better ways to bootstrap a Nir or Hyprland.
I don't know, dank-material-shell fills the same niche, and works better on NixOS out of the box, making it easier to setup while highly configurable. It seems broader than Noctalia in scope as well, so there are more components and they play nicer with each other.
Noctalia seems like it would fit more slimmer builds that want to move away from waybar.
Noctia* Gnome's Nautilus stuck in my mind gahh
It actually is Noctalia; mistake in the HN title.
Quite cool that it's possible now to create entire shells with AI-assisted programming
Should pair well with my tons of noctua fans [1] ;-)
[1]https://gigatexal.blog/assets/images/about/workstation.JPEG
All jokes aside, it looks really well done!
DankMaterialShell[0] with catpuccin theme is close to this and way much easier (for me at least) to set up.
[0] https://danklinux.com/