Noctalia is a desktop shell for window managers. Tiling and scrolling window managers (such as i3, MangoWM, Niri, etc.) are only window managers. They don't have any kind of graphical way to launch applications, there's no dock, bars or widgets of any kind. They only manage the windows, and you need to provide the rest by installing a number of different applications. Noctalia is a shell that provides a full desktop experience with all the bells and whistles you might expect from full desktop environments like KDE and Gnome.
The previous versions of Noctalia were based on Quickshell which was a memory hog. It used few hundred megabytes of memory per each display you had. Noctalia v5 is a complete rewrite in C++, which especially on multi-monitor systems uses only a fraction of the memory usage compared to Noctalia v4.
I switched from KDE to Niri+Noctalia a few months ago. It's highly customizable and pleasing looking environment. There are templates for different applications which applies your chosen color theme to applications so that you have unified look across all (or most) of your applications.
That's from their Discord. Lysec is one of the main developers of Noctalia Team.
Weird, it is tagged as a Permissive AI project in the open slop list, but the URL to the evidence links to an empty search. Maybe they backtracked.
Hm. I wonder what that means. Every AI project says they won't accept vibecoded slop... and yet...
That means they want people to actually look at the code generated by LLMs and understand how their stuff works so when it breaks they can take responsibility and quickly provide a fix. If your project breaks at 2 am Saturday and the dev that coded is not able to respond to questions on the PR because they don't understand what they wrote it's annoying to deal with.
I'd assume they mean they what Linus does it. Use LLMs to assist with coding, but then verifying the code yourself. Basically, not trying to skimp out on your share of the work, I guess.
Hardest part with that is every script kiddie in the world now thinks they're Linus when using an llm
Thanks for going to the effort to find that, much appreciated!
So not as bad as it could be, but I dearly wish they'd taken a firm stance against it, as literally every DE and 99% of Wayland compositors/window managers use AI now, all save for the handful of WM projects on this list.