Noctalia is a desktop shell for window managers. Tiling and scrolling window managers (such as i3, MangoWM, Niri, etc.) are only window managers. They don’t have any kind of graphical way to launch applications, there’s no dock, bars or widgets of any kind. They only manage the windows, and you need to provide the rest by installing a number of different applications. Noctalia is a shell that provides a full desktop experience with all the bells and whistles you might expect from full desktop environments like KDE and Gnome.
The previous versions of Noctalia were based on Quickshell which was a memory hog. It used few hundred megabytes of memory per each display you had. Noctalia v5 is a complete rewrite in C++, which especially on multi-monitor systems uses only a fraction of the memory usage compared to Noctalia v4.
I switched from KDE to Niri+Noctalia a few months ago. It’s highly customizable and pleasing looking environment. There are templates for different applications which applies your chosen color theme to applications so that you have unified look across all (or most) of your applications.
Somehow people might believe the largest open source software to ever exist has higher reviewing standards than a couple year old vibe coded WM I suppose.
(Saying this as a casual Niri user)
Is Niri vibe coded? Looking at the repo commit history all I see are well thought out proposals, drafts and implementations.
All the evidence points to not vibe coded.
If you don’t believe me I encourage you to look at the repo yourself and judge the work process.
https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
There are definitely vibe coded Niri lua plugins. But that’s not relevant here.
Nah you’re right I’m being a bit of a hater for the hyperbole.
But on a serious note, I think Niri will have a much harder time managing the good-and-bad faith vibe coders they’re calling for, because I think a single dev from Russia does most of the work.
I say limit the vibe coders to plugins.
If you want to work on Niri properly I would go with the human driven/responsible approach that the Linux kernel takes.
I think it’s a matter of building reputation. Like new PR submitters are vetted for violations of the LLM policy strictly. Trusted proved submitters can act with more agency. Just like any other open source project. 🤷♀️