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

tarpitt

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

nylonstrung

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

andxor

The design language looks heavily ChromeOS-inspired.

m0op

looks pretty cool ill give it a try!

m0op

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

jeffnash

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

darkwi11ow

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

mariocesar

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

aw4y

nice project, bad naming :)

toddmorey

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

maelito

Curious to see the difference with Regolith.

miladyincontrol

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.

shortformblog

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.

bashhq_r

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

silverbluep

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.

watty

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

cadamsdotcom

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.

tamimio

This looks like almost like cealistia and its shell

dkarvik

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.

sysashi

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.