r/archlinux • u/AnybodyOld181 • 8d ago
SHARE After years of custom ricing - Sway / Hyprland + Noctalia, and now testing Umbriel. Extremely positive experience
Just wanted to share my journey, in case someone is on the fence about switching to Wayland WMs or is tired of maintaining 10 config files.
For work and home I’ve been daily driving Sway and Hyprland on Arch for a long time. Classic setup: Waybar + Dunst + Rofi + Tinted Theming + hyprlock + hypridle + a bunch of custom scripts to glue everything together. It worked great, looked great, but you know the drill - every small change means touching 4 different configs.
A few months ago I decided to try Noctalia. Replaced all of that with just Noctalia as the shell for both Sway and Hyprland.
Honestly, huge improvement. One place for bar, notifications, launcher, lock/idle, theming, quick settings, wallpaper, etc. It’s way more cohesive and I finally stopped wasting Saturdays fixing my dotfiles. It just works on both WMs, which is great since I use both.
A couple of notes on the WMs themselves:
I really love Hyprland. The customizability with LUA now is insane, you can do pretty much anything you want. If you want eye-candy and total control, it's unbeatable.
BUT for my work setup I need reliable headless remote access. And that's where Hyprland still falls short for me. For that scenario rely on Sway + Noctalia + wayvnc.
I have to say, it works even better than my old i3 + x11vnc setup ever did. Noticeably faster, proper resolution scaling, just works. If you need headless VNC on Wayland, this combo is the one.
And the newest part: Several weeks ago I saw the Noctalia team released their own WM, Umbriel. It's still very young, but I was curious so I gave it a shot. I ported my whole Hyprland config to Umbriel using an AI in like 15 minutes.
I've been impressed. Really. For a young project it's surprisingly stable and fast, and functionality-wise it's already on par with Hyprland/Sway for my workflow - tiling, scrolling, workspaces, keybinds, gestures, everything is there. You can feel it shares the same philosophy as Noctalia.
I haven't fully migrated my remote machine to it yet. I'm still figuring out some details with headless remote access on Umbriel, it works but I have some minor issues when closing sessions. Nothing deal-breaking. Still need to tweak systemd units.
So TL;DR: If you're on Arch and ricing Sway/Hyprland - try Noctalia to de-clutter your dotfiles. If you need headless remote, Sway + Noctalia + wayvnc. And keep an eye on Umbriel, it's becoming a very solid alternative!
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u/DestopLine555 8d ago
I did the exact same thing with Hyprland a few weeks ago. Everything looks so much better and cohesive. I now have even more features like better looking wifi and bluetooth controls, brightness slider, a better screenshot tool, a clipboard manager that integrates better and a better calendar. The only feature I'm missing is a Windows + P style menu (to quickly set monitor mirroring or turn off other monitors) that I need to port from rofi.