Noctalia Shell

[!IMPORTANT] We are actively working on Noctalia v5 — a full rewrite that will be entering alpha soon. As a result, issues and pull requests targeting v4 will most likely not be merged or fixed. Thank you for your patience and support!

quiet by design

What is Noctalia?

A beautiful, minimal desktop shell for Wayland that actually gets out of your way. Built on Quickshell (Qt/QML) with a warm lavender aesthetic that you can easily customize to match your vibe.

✨ Key Features:

• 🪟 Native support for Niri, Hyprland, Sway, Scroll, Labwc and MangoWC
• 🎨 Extensive theming with predefined color schemes and automatic color generation from your wallpaper
• 🖼️ Wallpaper management with Wallhaven integration
• 🔔 Notification system with history and Do Not Disturb
• 🖥️ Multi-monitor support
• 🔒 Lock screen
• 🧩 Desktop widgets (clock, media player and more)
• 💡 OSD for volume and brightness
• 🔌 Nearly 100 plugins available (explore plugins)
• 🪄 Setup wizard for first-time users
• ⚡ Built on Quickshell for performance

Preview

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bf46f233-8d66-439a-a1ae-ab0446270f2d

📋 Requirements

• Wayland compositor (see supported compositors below)
• Quickshell: noctalia-qs
• Additional dependencies are listed in our documentation

🚀 Getting Started

New to Noctalia? Check out our comprehensive documentation and installation guide to get up and running!

🖥️ Wayland Compositors

Noctalia provides native support for Niri, Hyprland, Sway, Scroll, Labwc and MangoWC. Other Wayland compositors may work but could require additional configuration for compositor-specific features like workspaces and window management.

Scope

Noctalia is a desktop shell, not a full desktop environment. It provides the visual layer that sits on top of your Wayland compositor (bars, panels, notifications, a dock, and widgets) but it intentionally stays within that boundary. Understanding this helps set the right expectations for feature requests.

What Noctalia does

Noctalia focuses on the things a shell is responsible for: status bar, panels, application launcher, notifications, lock screen, idle management, OSD, theming, wallpapers, desktop widgets, dock, and multi-monitor support.

What belongs in a plugin

If a feature is useful to some users but not essential to the core shell experience, it’s a great candidate for a plugin. The plugin system is designed to make this easy: plugins can add bar widgets, panels, launcher providers, desktop widgets, and more.

Some examples of features that are better suited as plugins:

• Compositor-specific extras (e.g., Steam overlay for Hyprland)
• Hardware-specific controls (e.g., laptop fan profiles, battery thresholds)
• Third-party service integrations (e.g., smart home controls, Tailscale)
• Niche productivity tools (e.g., Pomodoro timer, RSS reader, Docker manager)
• Alternative visualizations or widgets

If you have an idea that fits this category, consider building a plugin for it!

What falls outside our scope

Some features go beyond what a desktop shell can or should do. These are typically responsibilities of the compositor, a dedicated application, or the system itself:

• File management: use a file manager application
• Display/login greeter: this runs before the shell and is managed separately
• Window management and overview: workspace switching and window tiling are compositor responsibilities
• Removable drive mounting: handled by system services like udisks and desktop applications
• Screen mirroring/casting: managed by the compositor or dedicated tools

We appreciate feature suggestions, but if a request falls into this category, it’s likely outside what Noctalia can provide. When in doubt, feel free to ask in our Discord.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions of any size - bug fixes, new features, documentation improvements, or custom themes and configs.

Get involved:

• Found a bug? Open an issue
• Want to code? Check out our development guidelines
• Need help? Join our Discord

💜 Credits

A heartfelt thank you to our incredible community of contributors. We are immensely grateful for your dedicated participation and the constructive feedback you’ve provided, which continue to shape and improve our project for everyone.

☕ Donations

While all donations are greatly appreciated, they are completely voluntary. Thank you to everyone who supports the project! 💜

📄 License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.

⭐ Star History