DMS | super heavyweight | sluggish | lots of eye candy, GUI configurable

Noctalia | welterweight | fast | professional look, GUI configurable

Waybar | lightweight | fast | minimal, DIY theming, hand configured

swaybar | flyweight | blazingly fast | ultra minimalist, hand configured

Noctalia uses about 70MB more RAM, and a little more CPU than Waybar. No brainer.

With v5 I wouldn't be surprised if they can even slim it down more than waybar. No dependency to worry about unlike waybar with gtk core.

If you consider the extras built into noctalia: notifications, screen lock (i think), wallpaper daemon .... daemons you have to install/configure piecemeal, noctalia is already in the ballpark of a waybar-based setup.

Tamzen

[foot](https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot) is an excellent st alternative on wayland.

Thanks, this is right down my alley. When I make the switch from X to Wayland, I'll check this out.

I'm on wayland. Kitty can be used as a layershell window. So you can build panels, taskbars, etc if you were so inclined. For example, you want fastfetch or htop as a live desktop background? Kitty can do that.

I'd like to introduce you to conky

I'd like you to check in on our dear friend conky. His door is full of newspapers and no one has checked inside the house for a while.

oh, i already use lemonbar for that. i was hoping for something a little more interesting than info bars :)

To be fair, "more consistent" if you only use KDE apps. Once you start adding other Linux apps, you end up with a motley crue of GTK 3, GTK 4, QT 5, QT 6, Electron apps with some dark, some light and everywhere in between. Consistency doesn't exist on any OS.

As someone who spends most of his time in nvim and TUIs (yazi, lazydocker, termusic, tmux in ssh ...), Niri is as keyboard centric as you want. Mine is configured to use vim keys.

Can confirm 8-9w idle for my N100 homelab server having 1 NVMe SSD, 1 SATA SSD, 16GB RAM.

That's on NixOS, but on other distros there are issues. When I tried nix last year, installing alacritty, for example, required an opengl wrapper. Neovim couldn't compile plugins without environment hackery.

Things just work with pacman or dnf.

The non-NixOS OpenGL/gpu story is unfortunately tricky as it requires a binary matchup between a userspace library and the kernel driver—which on non-NixOS is unknown to the Nix package manager since it's being managed by whatever the host is.

This is arguably a flaw in how Nvidia architected this, but it is what it is. The classical solution is nixGL [1], but this requires downloading special nixified versions of the libraries on every host system kernel change. An alternative option that I was involved in the development of is nix-gl-host [2], which manipulates the LD_LIBRARY_PATH for a Nix executable to allow it to link patched versions of the host's own userspace GL libraries.

[1]: https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL

[2]: https://github.com/numtide/nix-gl-host

This looks like those youtube shorts I've been seeing. Did you guys create those?

Don't think so, which shorts are you talking about?

In the shorts, you wake up as some famous person in history: Cleopatra, Caesar ... It's a first person POV of their life and surroundings. They're AI vids.

Tilers can remove Gnome's overly whitespaced decorations, probably saving 10% in screen pixels alone.

If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default.

Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.