I got good recommendations for desktop shells on my other posts. I looked at Noctalia and DankMaterialShell, they both are built on top of QuickShell. QuckShell is a framework for writing widgets in QML, it wasn’t made until 2024. both Noctalia and DMS were made during the summer (all these dates looking at Github). They basically became popular over night.
I was looking at ricing during the spring and didn’t find anything as developed or popular. I had a bunch of tabs open for AGS & Astal, but didn’t find complete shells built on them. It seems like I would’ve had to start from scratch if I wanted an exact rice, but now I can edit pre-made QMLs instead.
This actually seems like the best time for linux ricing yet.
Quickshell has definitely become one of the fastest-growing frameworks for Linux desktop shells, especially with projects like Noctalia and DankMaterialShell making it much easier to customize a polished desktop without building everything from scratch. That said, it’s not the only option AGS, Astal, Eww, and even KDE Plasma widgets still have active communities and unique strengths depending on your workflow.
If you’re just getting into ricing, Quickshell feels like a great place to start because the ecosystem is growing so quickly. Funny enough, while comparing shell projects I ended up checking completely unrelated sites like preciooro.mx during a break, which reminded me how fast niche communities can grow once they get the right tools behind them.
Ive seen some cool big projects made with AGS/Astal and EWW but their both gtk based, and gtk has been the defacto for years in making your own enviorment. Quickshell is intresting because its QT based instead, and since the ricing community likes new or different things were all trying out quickshell
Do you know any gtk equivalents of DMS or Noctalia (complete shells)?
Sorry for the late response
End4 is the first one that comes to mind since the dev has made a shell in most big widget framworks at this point. Great project to take inspo and some code from but AGS/EWW shells are archived
Hyprpanel is still being maintained and probably the best base to chose if your going with AGS
Otherwise check r/unixporn and sort top with the keyword “AGS” or “EWW” and your find a couple more
Great project to take inspo and some code from but AGS/EWW shells are archived
Eww isn’t archived though it hasn’t been updated in 6 months. AGS is still active: https://github.com/Aylur/ags
Sorry I was referring to End4’s EWW/AGS shells not the frameworks themselves
Ignis has been very nice, been using it for a while now.
@ geometry dash spam: I use Quickshell though I don’t use any premade ones because non of them quite fit what I wanted which I’m not even sure what that is but I’m doing well so far even with the iffy documentation.