desktop§

This is what shows up when I open the laptop. Under it there’s CachyOS, installed with no desktop at all. niri decides where windows go, and DankMaterialShell draws the rest: the bar, the launcher, notifications, the lock screen, the colors.

All of this runs on an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (GA402RJ), with a Ryzen 9 6900HS and two GPUs: a Radeon RX 6700S and the Radeon 680M that lives inside the CPU.

Get the same desktop§

Honestly, two steps get you about 90% of what you see here.

1. Install CachyOS and skip the desktop. When the installer asks which desktop environment you want, don’t pick any. You’ll reboot into a plain text console.

2. Log in there and run the Dank Linux installer.

   curl -fsSL https://install.danklinux.com | sh
   

   It asks you two things, which compositor and which terminal. I went with niri and Ghostty. It then installs everything and writes a config that already works. Reboot, and you’re looking at the DMS login screen.

That’s it. The rest of this page is what I tweaked afterwards, and I did all of it from the DMS settings window. I never had to open a config file.

CachyOS§

CachyOS is Arch Linux with some serious tuning. Underneath it’s still Arch, so pacman, the AUR and the Arch wiki work the same as always.

What I get out of it, over plain Arch:

[cachyos-v3] # (1)!
Include = /etc/pacman.d/cachyos-v3-mirrorlist

[cachyos-core-v3]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/cachyos-v3-mirrorlist

[cachyos-extra-v3]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/cachyos-v3-mirrorlist

[cachyos] # (2)!
Include = /etc/pacman.d/cachyos-mirrorlist

$ chwd --list-installed
> Installed profiles:
  amd   priority 4

niri§

niri is a Wayland compositor, the program that decides where each window goes. Most tiling compositors split your screen into smaller and smaller pieces as you open things. niri does the opposite. Windows sit side by side on a strip that keeps growing to the right, and you scroll along it. Opening a new window never shrinks the ones you already have.

Each monitor gets its own workspaces, stacked vertically. A window never spills over onto the monitor next to it.

What I changed§

Just two things, both from the DMS settings.

Every window opens maximized. Each app takes the whole width of the screen, and I flip through them like pages. It’s a single window rule that matches every app (^ matches any name). I made it in the window rules editor, which opens with Super+Shift+W. The second rule in the list came with DMS and keeps its own windows floating.

Here’s how that looks with Chrome open. The window fills the screen inside the frame. The panel on the right is the GPU monitor, opened from the bar.

Super+Enter opens Ghostty. The terminal is the window I open the most, so it gets the easiest key.

When I do want two things on screen at once, Super+R makes the column a third, half or two thirds of the screen. Super+[ drops the window into the column on its left, one on top of the other.

Keys§

The ones I use all the time. Super is the Windows key.

Super+X opens the power menu, and every option has its own letter: R reboots, P powers off, S suspends, L locks, X logs out. You hold the letter for half a second to confirm, so a stray key doesn’t turn the laptop off.

There’s also Restart DMS (D), which reloads the bar and everything else DMS draws, without closing any window. Good for when a plugin gets stuck.

What niri needs around it§

niri places windows and that’s it. Its wiki keeps a list of the other programs a desktop needs, and without them some apps break in odd ways: a file picker that never opens, a login that isn’t remembered. Here’s what covers each one on my machine:

DMS covers two of them, and the installer brings xwayland-satellite. The rest is one command:

paru -S xdg-desktop-portal-gtk xdg-desktop-portal-gnome gnome-keyring

Nothing to configure after that. niri ships a file that tells each request which portal answers it:

[preferred]
default=gnome;gtk; # (1)!
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Access=gtk;
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Notification=gtk;
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Secret=gnome-keyring; # (2)!

1. Ask the GNOME portal first, and fall back to the GTK one. The GNOME portal is the one that does screen sharing, and it opens Nautilus when an app asks you to pick a file.
2. Saved passwords go to gnome-keyring.

Sharing the screen§

Screen sharing in Chrome and Discord goes through the GNOME portal. The app asks, a dialog opens, and you pick a whole monitor or a single window.

DankMaterialShell§

DankMaterialShell, DMS for short, is made by AvengeMedia under the Dank Linux name. niri on its own only places windows. The bar, the launcher, notifications, the lock screen, all of that usually means installing and configuring a separate tool for each one: waybar, mako, swaylock, swayidle and friends. DMS is all of them in one program, with one settings window (Super+,). Even the login screen is DMS.

flowchart LR
  settings["DMS settings"] --> dms["DankMaterialShell"]
  dms -->|writes niri's config| niri["niri"]
  src["wallpaper or album art"] --> matugen["matugen"]
  dms --> matugen
  matugen -->|colors| apps["apps · terminal · editors"]

So I change something in the settings window, and DMS rewrites niri’s config and every app’s colors on its own.

Frame mode§

This one setting is most of why the desktop looks the way it does. Frame mode draws a thin border around the whole screen and melts the bar into it, so the bar stops looking like a strip glued to the top. You can see it around the full-screen screenshots on this page. I made mine thinner and almost see-through:

Colors§

The theme is set to dynamic. DMS pulls the colors out of the wallpaper with matugen and paints everything with them: the shell, my apps, the terminal, the editors. Change the wallpaper and the whole system follows. I switched the palette style from Tonal Spot to Fidelity, which stays closer to the colors actually in the picture.

GTK apps like Nautilus get the colors through a gtk.css that DMS writes into ~/.config/gtk-3.0 and ~/.config/gtk-4.0. Zed and Ghostty get a theme file of their own.

The cursor is Bibata Modern Classic, at 24 px. No secret there. I installed it from the AUR and picked it in the DMS settings, under Theme & Colors.

paru -S bibata-cursor-theme-bin

The bar§

I don’t use a dock. The bar up top is enough.

The control center at the right end has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio devices, brightness, night mode and dark mode.

The launcher§

Super+Space opens it. Apps come first, sorted by how often I use them, and the tabs at the bottom switch to files or plugins.

It’s also a calculator, always on. Type 77*34 and 2618 is already there, Enter copies it. Other tools wake up with a short prefix:

Plugins§

DMS has a plugin registry, and installing one is a click in the Plugins tab. These are the five I keep on. Three of them have code of mine in them.

How Music Theme works§

DMS already had every piece. They just weren’t connected, so I connected them.

1. DMS already knows what’s playing, and already picks an accent color from the album art for its media player.
2. The plugin waits 250 ms for that color to settle. Otherwise skipping through five songs would repaint the system five times.
3. It sends the color down the same path the wallpaper colors take. Everything DMS knows how to paint (GTK and Qt apps, terminals, Neovim, VS Code, Zen) follows the song.
4. When the music stops, or I turn the plugin off, the colors go back to the wallpaper.

No playerctl, no Python, nothing extra to install. It only uses what DMS already gives plugins.