Spent lots of time with Gnome 2.
In Dec 2024 I got hooked in Hyprland on Arch and have a cool rice for it. But I’ve tried KDE on desktop now with Parrot OS since Plasma is popular. Still need to find some cool dot files or rice it myself.
I’ve noticed SwayFX getting lots of love lately. I might use that as an option with Plasma but am afraid of conflicts. I’m excited about it since Linux has now officially replaced windows on my gaming rig, which is the very last MS computer left in my house.
Niri + Noctalia shell. I find the scrolling tiles to be excellent for my workflow, and the desktop shell feels nice and polished. Plus, Niri supports the Wayland
zwlr_layer_shell, which means I can finally use Wallpaper Engine; there’s even a Noctalia plugin for it.Niri has been great for gaming and streaming, so be sure to check it out if you haven’t.
I would be hesitant to use anything but KWin with Plasma. They were designed together as a set (like Mutter and Gnome), and I suspect replacing the WM would be no small task.
So Hyprland with Plasma would be no bueno? Honestly, if I can get my dots right, tile some windows, and get the hotkeys set up similarly, it might be just as good.
It might not work, yeah. KDE has integrated KWin and Plasma very purposely that I would be impressed if you could implement the one without the other. Not saying it can’t be done, because this is Linux after all, but KDE didn’t design Plasma to be modular software, so I would imagine you’d experience broken integrations and such that “just work” with KWin.
Do you mind elaborating on that Wallpaper Engine thing and also Natalia shell. What are they? I’m familiar with Niri, but never used it myself. (Not sure I like scrolling logic, I use barebones Sway.)
Noctalia is a fork of Quickshell, and it provides a bar, dock, background handling, plugins store, and easy settings menus to adjust everything. It feels nice and polished, and it’s got a lot of “nice to haves” covered. It also works with Sway! The scrolling logic is a Niri thing, so no need to worry about that.
Wallpaper Engine is a tool hosted through Steam that allows people to have animated desktops, sometimes ones that have sound and even interactivity. The problem is that it’s 100% built to work with Windows only. Because it’s changing something on your system and not just drawing things on screen like a game, there’s really no way for Proton or Wine to help.
And that’s what Linux Wallpaper Engine is for! It can take the wallpaper resources and apply them to window managers that support the
zwlr_layer_shellprotocol, which allows a z-positioning order for the background for Wayland clients. Noctalia has a plugin that makes that integration much easier to manage, so it feels like it’s part of the system rather than a hacky workaround.Noctalia is a Quickshell fork that’s preconfigured. It’s pretty solid, lightweight, and with the most Niri integration I’ve seen. Comes default in the Cachyos Niri config.