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Noctalia 5 Wayland Desktop Shell Is Now Officially Stable
(linuxiac.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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Could it look close to gnome-shell? And how well does it integrate with all the xdg-desktop stuff?
I am currently using gdm/gnome/PaperWM because I like the comfort of having all the gnome tooling for everyday use. Can the gnome-control-center still be used with Noctalia?
I customized the top bar to resemble Gnome's. That's stuff like clock and notifications top-center, control center top-right, using the Cantarell font. It's definitely not exactly the same. Here's the config. (It's written in Nix which generates the Noctalia config file.)
Some Gnome settings configure GTK which apply to GTK windows in non-Gnome window managers. But you wouldn't be using Gnome's control center. You'd use a combination of Noctalia's control center (handles lots of stuff like wifi, bluetooth, audio inputs & outputs) plus the settings system of whichever window manager you use Noctalia with. The WM will manage stuff like display settings, and key bindings.
I think xdg support is mostly managed by the window manager? That's stuff like screen & sharing, file pickers. I use Niri, and it's got solid support for that stuff. Some of my favorite Niri features are how it handles screen sharing and privacy.
thx, that sound promising. I'll have a look at the noctalia control center.
I use it with niri on debian stable. Works pretty good, no Talia is awesome, but it's no replacement for a full desktop. One thing that bothers me for example is that the no Talia calendar isn't actually showing my own calenders events. I didn't find a way to configure it.
The shell itself is very impressive and probably the best thing if you don't use a DE.
So, I came from Gnome to Niri + Noctalia, and one or the other of the latter read from Gnome's settings. My calendar stuff works great, but that's because I set everything up in Gnome first before later migrating.
I also had an issue with Pipewire video streaming not working on Niri one day (streaming to the internet, not from), and opening Gnome to see if that worked reestablished some xdg-portal config that had gotten lost somehow.
And so I keep Gnome for fear of losing those QoL things in Niri. I dunno if I'd recommend installing it just for that, but maybe that will give you some clues on how to solve your issue!
thx, that certainly informs my decision.
And to be clear, Niri is my daily driver, and I could probably figure out how those details work under the hood, but I don't really have the drive to do that right now.
I love Niri, but it takes a lot of intentional configuration!
could it look close? eh maybe. the visual customization of it is still kinda limited. like if you're looking to have the same customization levels of say Plasmashell you're out of luck. If you're ok with the "pill" look then it's fine but beyond that you couldn't make it look like say DWM's bar or what have you. But I suppose if you wanted it to look like cosmic or maybe gnome it'd be more doable since they all kinda share the same principal of "pills are a great look"
As far as if it'll play nice with GNOME? no clue. I've used it with Kwin in the past as a replacement for Plasmashell and it worked fairly well.