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.
Dux: Free, open-source Wayland desktop shell with file manager and theming (duxlabs.dev)
326 pointsby indigodaddy21 hours ago126 comments
shortformblog 19 hours ago
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.
rjzzleep 11 hours ago
I'd honestly recommend giving Mangowm a try. While Niri is beautiful, Mango is just more functional and more focused on getting basic features right IMO,
dsp_person 10 hours ago
my squinting eyes read this as mangrown
isqueiros 7 hours ago
> HDR Support added 4 months ago
Wow! This is actually enough for me to try it. Given that the only tiling wm on wayland with HDR support was Hyprland, which is backed by DHH, I was left feeling a bit sour about this.
preisschild 6 hours ago
Mango uses wlroots as underlying wayland compositor library and has been established for almost a decade now thanks to sway. Niri is using a new universal rust-based library (smithay), which doesnt implement all wayland extensions yet, but it get better all the time. background-effects blur for example was added in the last months!
shortformblog 4 hours ago
I don't have a single complaint with Niri—defintely not around functionality—so I'll stick with what I have, I think.
boomskats 2 hours ago
I too am exceptionally happy with Niri. Could you expand on your comment around functionality and the basic features you're talking about?
preisschild 6 hours ago
I've been using it with Zirconium (Fedora Bootc-based), can recommend!
xorcist 41 minutes ago
> makes use of Niri and DMS to create a usable out of the box TWM experience
The only word I understand is twm, and I absolutely certain this is not twm.
jeffnash 20 hours ago
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.
DuncanCoffee 4 hours ago
Unfortunate name switch, as in latin "dux" means "leader" and it was a title most recently used by Mussolini
lapinot 3 hours ago
There are several other mentions of this in other threads. Its entirely possible it is an oversight. Yet I would also not be entirely surprised if (at least for some people) it is a well-chosen subtle troll, given that there are people that would find such a thing funny in this space (= recent heavily LLM-driven wayland ricing, aka hyprland, omarchy, also neovim, etc).
pnt12 6 minutes ago
Dux is used in other contexts, eg in Portugal for leaders of universities 'fraternities'. No fascist implications whatsoever.
Some people are eager to raise their pitchforks, but we don't need to police every word.
drnick1 17 hours ago
This looks at lot like Android.
I am not sure how I feel about the curl | sh installation. This seems lile the kind of project which should become part of a Linux distro and thoroughly reviewed before it can be trusted unconditionally.
falsemyrmidon 15 hours ago
Piping curl to sh is pretty much always a bad practice.
Zambyte 12 hours ago
Have there been any notable incidents where mistrusting a curl | sh was the cause? I hear people say not to do it way more than I hear people talking about actual incidents it's caused.
pcthrowaway 10 hours ago
I mean you really don't wanna run this one
echo -e "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: 4\r\n\r\nrm /" | nc -l 8080 & curl localhost:8080 | sh
cowlevel 9 hours ago
it'll just print an error message because / is a directory. There's also a good chance curl starts first and fails to connect to the server that's not running yet.
cowlevel 9 hours ago
None. It was always a kind of snobbery against packages too small to be in package managers.
There are reasons curl|sh is a bad way to install things but security isn't one. It's difficult to uninstall, for instance.
throwaway375 8 hours ago
One coverage tracker used something like this for recommended CI setup, script was hijacked, users were advised to rotate all credentials available in CI.
szszrk 8 hours ago
I've had a few. Not as security attacks.
More just very badly made install scripts, which (in good faith) destroy some part of my operating system.
Messing up repositories added to package manager, creating dependency conflicts, overwriting config files I used. Even removing full folders - "because it's MINE" syndrome. --dry-run modes that are destructive. A lot of install scripts treat my computer as disposable machine meant for their app only.
pluc 5 hours ago
Not as bad as giving it your root password which it asks on step 3. Not via sudo or run0, it asks you a password which it saves so it can then use sudo or run0. Uuuh no.
christophilus 4 hours ago
It’s not a good look, but: if you’re installing this, you already trust it with your password, since its UI is the lock screen and the login screen, etc. where you enter your password.
pluc 3 hours ago
Yeah but I think there's a line between trusting a local app and trusting a remote install script
fwip 15 hours ago
Yeah, definitely ripped straight from Material Design. That clock widget looks like an exact copy of one from a phone I had.
I assume this project is all vibe-coded?
epihelix 13 hours ago
> I assume this project is all vibe-coded?
You know what happens when you assume, right?
https://github.com/duxlabs-dev/dux-shell?tab=contributing-ov...
Quoting in part from that:
> Using an LLM to help write code is fine. Submitting its output unread is not.
> * You are responsible for every line you submit. You have read it, tested it, and can explain it in review.
> * Say in the PR when a meaningful part of the code was AI generated.
> * Write PR descriptions, issues, and comments yourself. No AI-written or AI-rewritten text. A few plain sentences in your own words beat a page of generated summary. PRs and issues with AI-written text get closed without review.
> ...
> * PRs that read like unreviewed output, with narrating comments, invented APIs, or style that ignores the file they are in, get closed without review.
That looks very clearly non-vibe coded to me. (Also, it's a mature project with 79 releases over the last year and a bit, and 321 contributors.)
As much as I respect the abilities of agentic coding LLMs, I don't think we're yet at the point that you could vibe-code a novel Wayland DE. This is not trivial stuff!
WD-42 13 hours ago
There’s a new vibe coded Wayland shell every week now. It’s actually unfortunate DMS renamed when they did. I saw this and assumed it was just another vibe coded abandonware without realizing what it was.
thayne 12 hours ago
It isn't really a wayland DE. It's a shell that can be used with niri, hyprland, sway, etc. And is also built on top of quickshell.
cowlevel 9 hours ago
> You know what happens when you assume, right?
Judging by the text you quoted, you guess correctly?
> As much as I respect the abilities of agentic coding LLMs, I don't think we're yet at the point that you could vibe-code a novel Wayland DE.
You definitely could. Have you tried?
OuterVale 14 hours ago
I'm not saying you do this, but I do enjoy complaints about piping cURL to shell when so many people are giving LLMs full access to do whatever they want on their computers.
Sometimes they're the same people such at it is fun seeing the mental gymnastics to draw the line just under one's self.
preisschild 6 hours ago
They also have a fedora copr repo for proper package management if you use fedora.
mxuribe 12 minutes ago
While Dux looks very very beautiful without a doubt, what is the main premise for its existence? With no offense to the makers of Dux, maybe I'm dense but what does it bring that other DE's may not? For example, when Cosmic DE came out, in my mind it felt like it sits on a spectrum between Gnome and KDE Plasma, with maybe leaning a bit closer to Gnome. Now, to me at a glance, Dux sits in that same spectrum but leans a bit closer to KDE Plasma. Is that sort of the design intent, like, as "pretty" as Gnome, but as "flexible/tunable" as KDE Plasma? Forgive me if my comparisons are too obtuse...but i sincerely wish to understand what is it about Dux that the makers had in mind...I'm not seeing a premise stated anywhere that's obvious. If someone would kindly share any info.
By the way, I mean no offense to anyone who invested so much time making Dux! I'm just trying to understand/learn. :-)
darkwi11ow 20 hours ago
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
My most anticipated development roadmap these days.
javier2 17 hours ago
Haha, yeah. Once XFCE is fully wayland driven, I will probably be back on xfce.
RunSet 3 hours ago
From the link in the post to which you replied:
> It is not yet clear which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).
drnick1 17 hours ago
Agreed, it's the only mainstream desktop with Windows 2000-era ergonomics, which I particularly like. I reluctantly use GNOME now for its better security.
mahboi 16 hours ago
Does KDE not have that? I don't know a lot about this and have just been using whatever DE comes default. Gnome3 does seem like it's trying to be "different," and I remember Gnome2 being more normal.
drnick1 15 hours ago
No, KDE is kind of a mess and is far from the look and feel of classic desktop UIs.
vanviegen 10 hours ago
KDE has been nothing but polished and robust for me for a long time. To each their own, I guess.
kombine 5 hours ago
KDE is a better Windows desktop than Windows is itself. Plasma 6 and transition to Wayland has made it a complete desktop environment.
epihelix 13 hours ago
KDE seems surprisingly decent now (I tried Plasma out the other day).
Personally, I'm still using Unity 7 on X11, but as that DE's project is now seemingly dead again, I keep looking for a replacement. This one also looks pretty interesting!
I would really like to find something that handles fractional scaling as efficiently as Unity/Compiz. That, the dash, and (I'm ashamed to admit) wobbly windows are what keep me using it.
garciansmith 11 hours ago
I stuck with Unity 7 for a long time, but almost all of it can be replicated with KDE these days (I always liked the a top bar with the Window title and buttons, saves space on laptop screens). I'm surprised you find fractional scaling better on Unity/Compiz though, that was one of the reasons why I switched away (especially using fractional scaling at different levels on multiple displays). I still miss the HUD though.
pjmlp 8 hours ago
Same here, it is either XFCE or KDE, when on GNU/Linux.
Ideally WindowMaker, but there is not much development going on there nowadays.
the_kLeZ 10 hours ago
None of them seems to be aware that "Dux" is not really a good word, because it's the name used by Benito Mussolini for himself.
It reads the same as calling this WM "Fuhrer". Not a good name choice.
Average look, from the software part, not mature enough compared to other setups such as hyprland or sway.
SyneRyder 5 hours ago
Dux: "The top (male or female) academic student in a school, or in a year of school; the top student in a specified academic discipline."
Balinares 3 hours ago
And Führer means "driver", and the fact it means driver is irrelevant to why it would be a terrible name choice for a piece of software unless you're trying to appeal to a very specific audience. I'm not sure what point you think you're making.
borlox an hour ago
both "driver" and "leader"
dxdm 4 hours ago
I think Mussolini commonly went by "il duce", while dux seems to be going back all the way to ancient Roman times, where it's a noun related to the verb for "to lead", meaning leader, essentially. It and its root gave us "duke", "duct", "produce", among many others.
craigmart 44 minutes ago
"Duce" derived precisely from dux, and a famous fascist motto was "dux mea lux". If any italian finds this repo, it would be impossible for them not to think of Mussolini, I assure you.
whatever1 8 hours ago
LLLms brought the ui renaissance! Every forgotten by the god use case now has a pretty ui/tui! Heck even simple scripts now have well documented APIs. I love this.
The downside is that we are likely too late. I don’t see desktop/ apps / window metaphors etc surviving the AI apocalypse.
mariocesar 20 hours ago
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
nylonstrung 20 hours ago
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
hxii 20 hours ago
I knee-jerk moved to Noctalia because the Mango functionality was broken (due to config syntax change). Guess is a good opportunity to switch back.
jauntywundrkind 20 hours ago
Funny you say that, I just started doing specs, planning for a river based compositor based on Niri & Umbriel. After mentioning the idea a couple months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093022
Umbriel is a Niri- like scrolling wm from the Noctalia devs, have really been enjoying it. But I do want something more configurable, easier to play with. And river certainly seems like the main go-to base for that.
Running Noctalia is a must for me. It's a great shell, from a great team. The v5 took a lot of lessons from the past & really spun a very elegant beautiful new user product with a great architecture. Great stuff, not to be missed imo. Happy convert from DMS too.
nylonstrung 19 hours ago
That's awesome, I'm excited to see what you come up with because Umbriel is definitely cool.
I def recommend studying that Triad project: it excites me because it represents the idea that if River had an extra layer on top of you'd have the WM customization potential that normally just comes with building a custom WM or compositor but through config and having Niri/Noctalia/DMS compatibility solved by default
silverbluep 19 hours ago
When I moved from x to Wayland; I just moved from my bswpm setup to plasma because I couldn't get similar workflow that I set up in bspwm in either hyprland or sway. Then river entered my radar; but I think the development moved towards becoming a protocol rather than a WM. Nice to see river being used, might give this a try.
WD-42 12 hours ago
Here I am with Waybar and a few fuzzel scripts still wondering what all the fuss is about.
cadamsdotcom 19 hours ago
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.
Luker88 5 hours ago
Here in Italy the first thing it makes you think of is Mussolini.
Nobody will ever think of Tux here.
fodkodrasz 4 hours ago
I think the Teletubbies aesthetics maybe counterbalances that.
6P58r3MXJSLi 3 hours ago
> Plus, in school the dux is the person who came top of the class.
dux it's the italian version of gimp
Dariodip 2 hours ago
It’s a good idea but the name sounds a bit weird to us Italians. dux is the alias of Mu55olini
Herz 25 minutes ago
Ho aperto la zona commenti solo per verificare ci fosse questo commento ahah.
(I only opened the comments to see if someone had already mentioned this haha.)
smallerfish 3 hours ago
You can pick and choose which aspect of the UI you want. I have win n mapped to pop up the system tray widget, and win d mapped to pop up the calendar. No other parts of the UI show, so it's a nice balance of minimalism and functionality.
joeriley16 4 hours ago
I love Dux. Use it on everything other than my primary gaming PC. It is an amazing tiling manager and they are developing very quickly. Shoutout to the team behind it.
pythonRon 6 hours ago
I find it interesting that the demo of the themes shows only dark themes, but the demo of other features all use light themes.
dkarvik 18 hours ago
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.
Onavo 18 hours ago
If you want to go further, there's Wayland on Android too.
yjftsjthsd-h 9 hours ago
Wayland on Android sounds interesting, and the... distro? you linked is interesting, but I'm not seeing a connection?
muthuh 28 minutes ago
Oh, good; finally the long promised 'year of the Linux Desktop' has landed.
silverbluep 19 hours ago
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.
ChocolateGod 18 hours ago
Yeh that was my biggest issue when trying DMS. What's the reason Quickshell is heavy?
WD-42 12 hours ago
It’s lots of layers. Quickshell is built on QtQuick, which is QTs ui abstraction over regular QT, the c++ based app framework.
vrotaru 9 hours ago
On my system
qs - 330m
niri - 49m
dms - 90m
hefner1456 16 hours ago
I have been using a pretty basic DWM I customized with the old #! Linux keybindings I love so much for years now. I have been very reluctant to change this setup but Wayland does seem much better these days. I feel I may need to switch up soon. Kinda feels like the end of an era lol.
eisbaw 3 hours ago
Noctalia, Niri, NixOS
sysashi 18 hours ago
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.
diabllicseagull 17 hours ago
I love what these shells do for the linux desktop, but on laptops it makes me bit concerned about battery life. The last time I checked out Dank Material Shell, I saw an impact on power consumption over vanilla Niri.
toddmorey 20 hours ago
Currently running Noctalia and interested in anyone who has switched to Dux & can talk out pros and cons. Particularly interested in creating custom widgets.
miladyincontrol 20 hours ago
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.
darkwi11ow 20 hours ago
They exist, for example SteamOS has closed source desktop shell based on Steam client
dofm 17 hours ago
Was it Caldera that shipped a linux with Motif?
(We're talking three decades ago now)
opan 16 hours ago
Their gamescope compositor is free software at least.
darkwi11ow 13 hours ago
Good point, available at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope BSD license
Gualdrapo 19 hours ago
fwiw I can remember all the turmoil when Qt had no free tier and KDE was work of the devil
tux1968 18 hours ago
If you or anyone else want a trip down memory lane around that topic, peppered with some interesting revelations, this video is worth checking out:
KDE: The Documentary — The Story of Free Software Underdogs
_ZeD_ 11 hours ago
This project will end up hanging upside down.
lormayna 9 hours ago
Only Italians will understand that
aw4y 20 hours ago
nice project, bad naming :)
hmokiguess 20 hours ago
why?
Tox46 19 hours ago
ever heard of an Italian guy named Benito Mussolini?
duttish 19 hours ago
As I understand it he used "Il Duce"? Which makes this feel like a stretch.
syjer 19 hours ago
He also used the latin form Dux. (there are statues and motto with that term).
mahboi 18 hours ago
Whatever, just means leader
carlob 18 hours ago
So does führer
cowlevel 9 hours ago
most German people today have a Führerschein and are fine with that.
aw4y 5 hours ago
but if a software name is Führer I would comment in the same way, bad naming.
fp64 4 hours ago
I'm curious, what is the worst that could happen if people ignored your warning? Some agent runs the installer and accidentally tricks the user into aligning with ideologies you are not supposed to align with?
mahboi 8 minutes ago
Führer also just means leader and is whatever, other than the unicode being annoying
ssernikk 19 hours ago
It just means a leader or a guide in latin IIRC
pjmlp 8 hours ago
Github contributions, Claude, oh well.
At least some brownie points for using Go, I guess.