DankMaterialShell is now Dux Shell, and Dank Linux is now Dux Labs.

DMS 2.0 "Heisenberg" is here with a new design across the shell, plugins for Dash and OmegaDock, the new Dux Dot, and much deeper compositor support for Hyprland, MangoWC, and newly added, Aqueous. There's a customizable lock screen, the Dux Lyrical Engine, and Dux Files, a new standalone file manager.

DankMaterialShell is now Dux Shell​

DMS started as one shell. Since then it has picked up a greeter, a system monitor, a search service, a calendar, a package repository, and a plugin community, and 2.0 adds a file manager. That's a lot to keep calling DankMaterialShell, so the whole suite is moving under one name: Dux Labs.

It's the same team and the same projects. The shell is still DMS, and the command is still dms.

Why "Dux"?​

Dux is our mascot, and the name is a nod to Tux, the Linux penguin. It's short, it's not taken by any major software projects, it starts with a D so we don't have to rename the binaries (dms, dcal, dgop), and it gives a friendlier vibe than "Dank" did.

The new GitHub org is duxlabs-dev. The package repositories move shortly after launch. Details are in the repositories section at the end.

A new design​

2.0 brings Material 3 Expressive to Settings, Control Center, Dash, and the shared widgets, with new controls, grouped settings, new navigation, colors, and motion.

Settings is reorganized so things live where you'd look for them. Bar widgets have their own options, Dash has its own page, and related settings open in subpages.

Dash plugins​

Dash is now customizable beyond the built-in tabs. Plugins can add a full tab, a card in the overview, or both. Reorder and resize cards, choose what belongs in your overview, and configure each entry.

The built-in pages have been rebuilt too: the overview, media player, weather, and wallpapers all use the new design.

For plugin authors, the new surfaces are dash and dashCard. A composite plugin can provide both. See the Dash plugin docs for manifests, options, sizing, and examples.

Build your own lock screen​

The lock screen now uses widgets. Add, move, resize, and configure the clock, date, notifications, status, and power controls. Choose a clock style, change its colors and font, and put things where you want them.

The editor gives you a preview while you make changes. Open Settings → Security → Lock screen to get started.

Dux Lyrical Engine​

The media player now has synced lyrics with word-level and even syllable-level precision when the source provides timing.

Choose your providers and drag them into priority order in Settings → Sound & media → Media player. The built-in sources include Better Lyrics, Unison, LyricsPlus, KuGou, LRCLIB, and YouTube Music. Local lyrics are supported too. Turn all providers off to use local lyrics only.

Plugins can add lyrics providers without needing a QML interface. Widgets can also use the lyrics service for their own displays. See lyrics providers and the lyrics API.

Dux Files​

Dux Files is a new file manager from Dux Labs, shipping alongside 2.0. It's a standalone app: a small Go daemon does the file work and a Quickshell window sits on top. It shares the look of the shell and follows your DMS theme when both run, but it doesn't need DMS.

• Tabs and split view: open folders in tabs, or show two folders side by side and drag files between them.
• List, grid, and column views: each folder remembers its sort order and list or grid view. Column view stays on as you browse.
• Preview: press Space to see a preview and details of the selected file next to the list.
• File operations: copy, move, rename, and delete with progress and undo. If you don't have permission, retry as administrator.
• Archives: open zip, tar, 7z, and rar files, and compress files into zip or tar, without installing extra tools.
• Search: search the current folder or your whole home, filtered by type, date, or size.
• Drives and network shares: mount USB drives, unlock encrypted ones, and connect to SFTP, SMB, and WebDAV servers.
• Works with your apps: "Show in folder" from your browser opens Dux Files. It can also replace the open and save dialogs in other apps.
• Keyboard navigation: drive the entire interface with the keyboard only.

Get it from the installation guide, and read the rest in the Dux Files docs.

Wallpaper Generator​

Make your own Material 3 wallpaper at wallpaper.duxlabs.dev. Pick shapes, patterns, and a palette. Wallpapers can be exported as a PNG, or as a DMS format which automatically follows your theme colors.

Operation Freedom: Dux Dot​

Dux Dot is a new dynamic island-style hub built around one persistent dot. It morphs into your launcher, dashboard, control center, media, weather, wallpaper, and notifications. Keep your existing IPCs and keybinds, or route them through the new bar settings.

It is a super minimal way to run DMS, and it stays out of your way. Clean, fast, fullscreen, and gamer-mode ready. Place it, or fling it, anywhere on the screen.

The island, anywhere​

The island can now go in any bar as a widget, float anywhere on screen, run vertically, or tuck into the top of the display in notch mode.

The compact face holds more widgets, including media, weather, a workspace switcher, a privacy indicator, and a system tray. Volume, brightness, and other changes can show in the island instead of the usual on-screen display.

Bars that move like the island​

Bars now use the same spring motion as the island, so size and corner changes ease into place instead of jumping.

Thickness can be fractional or fit to the widgets, and middle or right clicking empty bar space can run an action you pick.

Each section can turn on auto overflow. Flexible widgets shrink first, and whatever still doesn't fit moves into an overflow menu. Per widget, set Placement to Auto, Keep in Bar, or Always in overflow.

Dock​

The dock can be used as an OmegaDock now. Add more than one, put each on any edge, and choose a compact icon row or a taskbar.

Taskbar mode is new. The dock spans the whole edge, end to end. Compact mode is still a strip of icons.

The dock runs the same widgets as the bar, including plugins, so a clock, tray, media, workspaces, or anything a plugin provides can sit next to your apps. A widget can open as a popout or inline, where the dock grows and the panel sits beside the icons. Plugin authors provide that panel with attachedContent. See widgets in a dock.

Hover magnification scales the icon under the pointer and can push its neighbors aside, and the focused app can expand into a pill. The dock animates on the same spring as the island and the bars.

Control Center​

In the Control Center, tiles come in a smaller half-height size for tighter grids, and pill widgets like volume and brightness can be sized in half steps.

Digital Wellbeing​

Dash has a new Digital Wellbeing tab. It tracks screen time, lets you set a daily limit and per-app limits, and tells you when you hit one. Scripts can read the same status over IPC.

niri​

niri can turn the touchpad on and off. DMS shows the change on screen, and the default config binds the touchpad key to toggle-touchpad. Focus follows mouse works too.

Switching workspaces can show an on-screen display, window rules can set a column's width and height as a percentage, and connected displays can be cycled. A hidden bar gets out of the way while the overview is open, and a dock set to overview-only shows up there.

Hyprland and MangoWC​

Hyprland catches up with 0.56: dwindle, master, and scrolling layouts with their own settings, special workspaces as scratchpads, and the new blur styles, glow, motion blur, and group tabs. Wobbly windows work on Hyprland git.

MangoWC 0.18 renamed its config keys to snake_case. DMS writes the new format, and dms config mango-migrate converts an existing config.

On both, mouse, touchpad, keyboard, and focus follows mouse are in Settings, and dms setup can start the shell from hyprland-session.target or mango-session.target.

Aqueous and Umbriel​

Aqueous gets comprehensive support, and Umbriel gets basic support.

They join niri, Hyprland, MangoWC, Sway, labwc, and Miracle.

More in 2.0​

• Launcher: dmenu mode, custom keybinds, app editing, VPN search, Open with for files, Flatpak uninstall, an option to focus a running window instead of launching a new one, and an option to turn off history.
• Workspaces: dot, line, and card indicators, a compact mode, and a minimum workspace count.
• Theming: bold color variants, wallpaper-tinted terminal colors with background opacity, Positron support, and a per-bar background color.
• Wallpaper: cycling can recurse into subdirectories.
• Audio: mono audio toggle.
• Network: Fortinet VPN with SAML and password auth.
• Settings: Alt+Arrow switches panes, touchpad click method, and config.d to split settings across files.
• Multiplexers: Herdr joins tmux and zellij.
• Blur: strength slider.
• Plugin browser: shelves, typo-tolerant search, detail pages, and one-click upvotes.
• Desktop widgets: editor improvements.
• Notifications: extra rule conditions, timed per-app mutes, hovered popups stay put, and invokeLast over IPC.
• Screenshots: snap to open popouts and Ctrl+C to copy without saving.
• Displays: per-output ICC color profiles and color temperature.
• System updates: floating window, Portage backend, highlighted upgrade logs, and a reboot prompt after kernel updates.
• Channels: dms switch beta moves to beta packages after taking a backup, and dms switch stable goes back. Name a package to switch only that one. See Switch channels.
• Distros: official PikaOS support, Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux), and native FreeBSD support.

New plugin types​

Plugins can now add a tab or a card to Dash and sit in the dock, opening as a popout or a panel that grows the dock. Desktop plugins can also go on the lock screen. See the Dash plugin docs and widgets in a dock.

The plugin browser in Settings was rebuilt, led by lung595. It has a Discover page with shelves and daily and weekly picks, filters for your compositor, typo-tolerant search, detail pages, one-click upvotes, and undo after an uninstall.

Update checks only flag a plugin when the remote has commits you don't have yet (Bernardo Gomes), and plugin state saves on the first change after a reload (Mario-Mohar).

The registry is past 380 plugins and 47 themes, up from 337 and 42 at 1.6. The most upvoted new plugins are Sands and Orbit Bluetooth by lung595, Screenshot+ by pcmid, MangoWM Layout Manager by omarluq, and Bitwarden Dankbar and DankChat by coldi1337. satoshoe-dev and by-architect each added six.

Upvote the plugins you use so other people find them.

Fixes and polish​

Alongside the redesign, 2.0 carries 90+ bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements across the shell. Some of the ones you may notice:

Upgrade Notes​

(Breaking) App ID Change​

The DMS app ID is now dev.duxlabs.shell, replacing com.danklinux.dms. The window rules DMS manages itself are updated automatically. If you wrote your own compositor window rules for DMS windows, update them to the new ID.

On niri, for example, this:

window-rule {
    match app-id=r#"^com\.danklinux\.dms$"#
    open-floating true
}

becomes:

window-rule {
    match app-id=r#"^dev\.duxlabs\.shell$"#
    open-floating true
}

Plugin authors: update your widgets​

For example, this:

import qs.Widgets

DankButton {
    text: "Open"
}

becomes:

import qs.DCommon.Widgets

DButton {
    text: "Open"
}

Some common replacements:

StyledText keeps its name and is also available from qs.DCommon.Widgets. Shell-specific types still live in qs.Widgets, so keep that import if your plugin uses them. Check the warning for each deprecated type rather than replacing every import blindly.

The replacements are in the shared widget library, and the compatibility wrappers show the old and new names.

Notes for Package Maintainers​

DMS now lives at duxlabs-dev/dux-shell.

The desktop files and icon follow the new app ID, so update any install lines that name them:

Dux Calendar's assets moved the same way, from com.danklinux.dankcalendar.* to dev.duxlabs.calendar.*.

Binary names, systemd units, and the dms-open.desktop URL handler are unchanged.

Renaming packages to the new names is not required, but we'd prefer it:

The people behind it​

DMS is founded and maintained by bbedward and purian23. Huỳnh Thiện Lộc has been a close and vital contributor, landing features, bug fixes, and ongoing plugin maintenance. Thank you to everyone else contributing code, plugins, translations, packaging, testing, and bug reports.

Thanks to LuckShiba and EricDraven for their NixOS work and community support.

Thank you to apollo79 and georgestafilidis, the two new designers who pioneered the design in 2.0 and much more daily!

apollo792.0 designgeorgestafilidis2.0 design

A special thank you to everyone who supports Dux Labs through GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi. Your support keeps this project going, and we're grateful for every one of you!

Community Contributions​

600+ commits from 65 contributors since 1.6. Time for a callout:

Huỳnh Thiện Lộc landed 31 commits, including the dock's proximity magnification, neighbor push-apart, and animated focused-app pill, plus toggling the compositor overview from the dock's launcher button. He also brought the island's system tray slot and overflow menu, auto-hide for the island in overlay mode, and the niri workspace-switch OSD. On the screenshot side: touch and stylus region capture, snapping to open panels, Ctrl+C to copy without saving, and the --hud flag. Also the redesigned keybinds cheatsheet, Flatpak uninstall from the launcher, and recursive wallpaper cycling.

Also: per-output ICC color profiles and color temperature (KIDult2226), VPN search, do-not-disturb while screen sharing, and timed idle inhibitor presets (avesst), gamma exceptions for fullscreen and excluded apps (euletheia), and native FreeBSD support (Zer0TraceX).

All Contributions​

Thanks also to the translators, package maintainers, plugin and theme authors, and everyone testing builds and reporting bugs. If we missed you, let us know on Discord or GitHub.

The repositories​

2.0 is the rebrand. The package repositories move next.

New Dux Labs repositories are almost ready to replace the AvengeMedia and DankLinux ones. Shortly after this release, 2.0.1 will move installs and updates onto them, including dankinstall. Existing users will run dms migrate dux to point their distro's repositories at Dux Labs. Until that ships, keep the repositories you already have.

Resources​

Special thanks to YaLTeR and the niri community for their continued support and collaboration.

DankMaterialShell (DMS) 1.6 "Marble Tabby" is here! This release brings significant performance improvements and resource optimizations across the shell and CLI, Dank Island - a new island-style bar instance, spring-based motion across the whole shell, GTK3 dynamic theming, a standalone greeter, unified versioning across the Dank Desktop, a big plugin ecosystem push, and hundreds of fixes and improvements across DMS.

Performance & Resource Optimizations​

1.6 puts a lot of this cycle into making the shell and its companion tools faster and lighter:

• IPC: dms ipc call used to launch a whole quickshell process just to deliver one message. Now it talks to the shell directly, and the median call dropped from 49.8 ms to 9.6 ms. Every keybind and script that goes through dms gets this for free. dms ipc is now even faster than calling quickshell ipc directly.
• Screenshots: saving is 4-8x faster. A full 1440p screen writes in 25 ms instead of 94 ms, JPEG in 29 ms instead of 75 ms, and re-capturing a saved region in 12 ms instead of 106 ms.
• Region selector: dragging a selection used to redraw the entire screen on every pointer move, so it couldn't keep up with the display. Now only the edges of the rectangle redraw, and drags feel instant at any refresh rate.
• Color picker: same story for the eyedropper - it stopped copying the whole screen every time the pointer moves, so it stays smooth on big and multi-monitor setups and stops burning CPU while you drag.
• Memory: the shell uses ~76 MB less idle memory (-19%) on a clean two-monitor setup.
  • There is additional work in DMS 1.6 that will further improve startup times and memory usage once QML Caching is implemented in Quickshell.

vs other tools​

dms, grim, and hyprpicker all grab the screen from the compositor the same way, so the differences below mostly come down to what each tool does after that (Image encoding, compression, etc.).

Screenshots vs grim:

grim writes its PNG on a single core; dms uses all of them. The new PNG encoder in DMS outperforms grim even with compression enabled.

Color picker vs hyprpicker: with the picker open and the pointer sitting still, hyprpicker keeps redrawing at ~59% of a CPU core on this setup; dms color pick sits at 0% and only redraws when the pointer actually moves.

Dank Island​

1.6 introduces Dank Island, a new bar instance built around a central island with satellite widgets.

• Satellites: areas for widgets on either side of the central island. The island itself hijacks the center section of the bar, and the left and right section become the "satellites."
• Live faces: The face of the island reacts dynamically to user interactions and system events - such as notifications, media playback, and OSD triggers.
• Spring physics: the island uses new spring-based animations that are built into DMS 1.6
• Home face layout: a drag and drop editor in the Island settings decides what sits on the idle face and in what order. Media, clock, weather, status, notifications, plus dedicated volume and brightness activities that show as an icon, a percentage, or both
• Media player variant: the standalone island media player got a redesign, and a Wallpaper toggle in Settings -> Media Player blurs the album art behind the player in both the island and the dashboard
• Multiple bars: island and frame modes support multiple bar instances

Unified Versioning​

1.6 changes how the Dank Desktop is versioned: dsearch, dgop, dcal, and dgreeter are now versioned and released together with DMS. One version number covers the whole desktop.

Rest of the Desktop Suite​

dank-greeter​

The greeter is its own repo now, dank-greeter. This is the first release.

• Face unlock starts on its own if pam_howdy is in the stack
• Launched sessions get the desktop env vars, like GDM does (fixes issue with launching GNOME sessions)
• Follows your live DMS config instead of a copy of it (fixes issues with out-of-sync settings)

dgop​

• Process CPU% is per sample interval now (cwelsys)
• GPU reclaimable memory no longer counted as used
• Falls back to per-core temps when there is no package sensor
• TUI search and custom keybinds
• FreeBSD support

dsearch​

• Survives a corrupted index or metastore db instead of dying
• Fixed watcher churn and a few search panics
• FreeBSD support

dcal​

• Drag to create events in day and week views
• Multi-select, context actions, copy/paste (artrixdotdev)
• RSVP to one occurrence of a recurring invite, chips show RSVP state
• Completing a recurring task moves it to the next occurrence
• Default calendar, date/time locale override, ctrl+n for a new event
• CalDAV fixes for non-compliant servers (JCapucho)
• Fixed rescheduled series on Microsoft and all-day events on Google
• All-day events and exported ics keep the right timezone
• French and Bulgarian translations

Screenshots & Capture​

Beyond the encoder speedups above, capture itself got better:

• Drag a region across outputs, alt to restrict to one output, ctrl to drag the selection or resize it from any corner (hthienloc)
• Native cursor shapes in the selector (hthienloc)
• Initial scroll capture mode, with a live preview of the stitched result beside the capture area (hthienloc)
• dms screenshot -g prints the selected region as X,Y WxH and skips the capture, exit code 1 on cancel, so scripts that used slurp can swap it in (hthienloc)
• 10-bit color/HDR support via wp_color_manager_v1
• --json flag for capture metadata

Theming​

• GTK3 dynamic theming: with adw-gtk3 installed, DMS copies the light and dark variants into ~/.local/share/themes and patches the copies with your generated colors. GTK3 apps then follow the system color scheme and switch live, no restart. Without adw-gtk3 it falls back to the dank-colors.css import. A gtk.css or dconf gtk-theme you set yourself is no longer overwritten. (euletheia)

• Qt: qtengine works as a platform theme (Conava), and so does QT_PLATFORMTHEME=kde.
• Source color: Settings -> Theme & Colors has a Source Color dropdown for wallpaper palettes. Dominant is the default and matches previous behavior. Colorful quantizes the image and scores toward a vivid, well-lit color, so a warm wallpaper with a large muted region no longer produces a cold palette. Five more modes map to matugen's --prefer and need matugen 4.1. Also --source-mode on dms matugen generate. (Conava)
• matugen: smart mode and scheme type are configurable (haikalllp), dank16 emits the full matugen color format (pdf), and there are new templates for Fcitx5 and Vesktop (hthienloc).
• Contrast: registry themes ship a contrast report and the theme browser badges each one AA or AAA. The levels are WCAG, the W3C accessibility spec: AA is body text at 4.5:1 or better against its background, AAA is 7:1. The report covers body text, accents, and non-text bits like borders and icons in both dark and light, and the badge is the worst of them.

• Settings -> Theme Color has an Extract button that writes the live theme out as one dark and light JSON file. (hthienloc)

Network​

• WiFi hotspot: share the machine's connection from the shell (ronharel02)
• WiFi list: refresh button in the control center (YewFence)
• Cellular: modem support on the NetworkManager backend (kmf)
• OWE: open networks with opportunistic wireless encryption connect, including transition mode
• Fortinet: password profiles authenticate inside DMS with openconnect --authenticate and hand the short-lived cookie to NetworkManager. An untrusted server certificate shows its fingerprint for confirmation, and the fingerprint is only saved once the tunnel actually connects (Grant07)
• 802.1x: EAP method selection, and credential persistence works again

Config & Backup​

settings.json and session.json only store what differs from the defaults now, so your config is the diff and not a dump of every value DMS knows about. Machine-specific state moved out of settings.json into session.json, which makes the settings half portable between machines.

dms backup create writes a tar.gz of ~/.config/DankMaterialShell, and dms backup restore <archive> puts it back.

Fewer Dependencies​

1.6 keeps shedding external dependencies:

• The quickshell configuration is now embedded in the DMS binary and mounted at runtime
• dgop is built in instead of a separate process
• curl dropped, bluetooth audio codec support built in
• Initial FreeBSD support landed along the way

Notes for Package Maintainers​

• The quickshell UI is embedded in the dms binary and mounted at runtime. Packages no longer install /usr/share/quickshell/dms, and XDG auto-discovery of ~/.config/quickshell/dms is removed: -c or DMS_SHELL_DIR explicitly override the embedded config.
• Shared widgets live in the dank-qml-common git submodule. Building from a clone needs git submodule update --init --recursive first. GitHub's auto-generated "Source code" archive never contains submodule content, so build from dms-source.tar.gz on the release instead: it ships with DankCommon bundled and needs no submodule step. dms-cli-<version>.tar.gz carries the Go source with vendored modules.
• The embedded shell is staged into core/internal/shellembed/dist by make sync-shell. make dist and make build run it for you. If you call go build directly, run make sync-shell first or the withshell tag fails with pattern all:dist: no matching files found. Pass tags as one list: -tags 'distro_binary,withshell'.
• Release binaries and all -git packages build with the embedded shell.
• The greeter is its own package now, dank-greeter, with its own release artifacts. dms greeter install expects the dms-greeter binary from that package.
• dsearch, dgop, dcal, and dgreeter tag and release together with DMS from this release on.

Plugins​

The plugin ecosystem got numerous updates this cycle

• New grid-style plugin browser, and runtime plugins are searchable from settings (hthienloc)

• Portable plugin lockfile for reproducing a plugin set across machines (artrixdotdev)
• Support for multiple plugin & theme registries: dms registry add <name> <git-url>, or Settings → Plugins → Registries. Themes resolve from extra registries too. Started by louzt via env vars
• Plugin translations: drop a translations/ directory next to plugin.json and wrap strings in I18n.trFor("myPlugin", "..."). Nothing has to land in the DMS repo, users get your translations by installing the plugin
• Desktop widgets: runtime resize API, so a widget can change its own size (SunPodder)
• Plugins are a step in the first-start wizard now, and the launcher's power options moved to a built-in plugin

The registry is past 335 plugins and 42 themes, 86 of the plugins added this cycle. The directory ranks them by 👍 on each plugin's tracking issue in the registry repo. If a plugin earned a spot in your setup, go upvote it so other people find it.

Translations​

DMS ships 22 languages besides English. The term catalog got an overhaul this cycle: around 160 dead terms deleted, context added where one English word was doing two jobs, and a mechanism for carrying the same term under different contexts. Arabic, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian are new. Time and date formatting can follow the system locale instead of the DMS format options.

Plugins carry their own catalogs on top of that, so a plugin can be translated without anything landing in the DMS repo. Settings option rows that overflowed in longer languages are dropdowns now.

Everything Else​

• Bluetooth: multi-adapter support, soft rfkill unblock
• Notifications: DnD bypass globally and per-app, an option to ignore app-requested timeouts (tkroll-ionos), and running the default action on body click instead of expanding the text
• Launcher: ctrl-tab to cycle modes, a spotlight style for the niri overview, and IPC parity between spotlight-bar and the full launcher (hthienloc)
• Dock: separate pinned and running apps, cycle grouped windows (hthienloc), minimize support
• Clipboard: drop content in to store it, an overlay layer option (hthienloc), clearing only what the filter matches (Mario-Mohar), and copy as plain text for entries that have one
• Bar: corner style and length padding, a focused window details popout (hthienloc), configurable tray icon spacing (tassiovirginio), popout variants for the power menu and color picker
• Lock screen: vertical clock style (hthienloc), a separate text input for IMEs, an option to hide weather
• Settings: Niri keyboard and mouse/touchpad tabs (hthienloc), location search for theme and gamma coordinates (Curious-r)
• Gamma: configurable transition duration for time-based night mode, values below 2500k, a suspend-aware scheduler that stops losing track across sleep, and gamma and contrast sliders that work with night mode off
• Power menu: user-defined custom buttons (FormalSnake), soft reboot on systemd
• Battery: optionally lower refresh rate on battery (atimofeev), estimated end time (hthienloc), charge and discharge rate in the bar widget (SpyrosPsarras), and a circle style per bar instance with theme or step colors
• Wallpaper: folder-based selection, shuffle (greenbugx), random cycling order (hthienloc)
• Install: dms setup headless and a non-interactive dankinstall script (JDKamalakar)
• IPC: settings dump for the full live config as JSON (sweenu), dumpSession, notification dismiss (euletheia), tray menu open (lankong0522), and openAt/toggleAt for opening popouts at a location

What's Next​

1.6 is also a direction marker. DMS started as a shell, and the pieces around it - search, monitoring, calendar, greeter - have grown into a suite that now versions and releases as one. From here development shifts toward a full desktop environment paradigm: standalone apps that share the Dank design language and theming, on any compositor, instead of everything living inside the shell.

In development for upcoming releases:

• Standalone file browser: the file browser graduates from a shell surface into its own app
• DankConnect: phone integration for the Dank Desktop
• More shell built-ins splitting into standalone suite apps, the way the greeter did this cycle

Community Contributions​

540+ commits from 63 contributors this cycle. One deserves a callout:

Huỳnh Thiện Lộc landed 62 commits, including two of the performance wins above: the direct-socket IPC path and the region selector overlay cache. Also the cross-output region capture, native cursor shapes, the scroll capture live preview and --geometry flag, the dock pinned/running split and grouped window cycling, Niri keyboard and mouse/touchpad settings tabs, the QR generator launcher, and battery end-time estimates. On top of that, the Quick Capture and Emoji Picker plugins in the registry are his.

Also: GTK3 dynamic theming (euletheia), custom power menu buttons and Apple Music animated covers (FormalSnake), WiFi hotspot (ronharel02).

All Contributions​

Resources​

Special thanks to YaLTeR for collaborating with the DMS team, for niri - the compositor that inspired DMS, and for hosting DMS on the niri Discord.

DankMaterialShell (DMS) 1.5 "The Wolverine" is here! This release introduces Frame Mode, a new connected surface that ties the whole shell together, native DankCalendar integration, Hyprland Lua config and enhanced MangoWM support, a reworked Material 3-like shadow system, and hundreds of fixes and improvements across DMS.

Frame Mode + Connected or Standalone Surfaces​

DMS 1.5 adds the option to draw the shell surfaces as one connected surface, tying modals (such as the launcher), popouts, and notifications into the bar and frame.

• New Animations: There are new animation options "Directional" and "Depth" in addition to the standard and default "Fade and Scale"
• Hover to Open: Optionally popouts can be opened on hover, without a mouse-click

DankCalendar​

DMS 1.5 brings native support for DankCalendar (docs) as a calendar backend over IPC. This is a major new application addition that unifies Local, Google, Microsoft, CalDAV, and iCloud accounts into a single agenda.

When the dcal daemon is active, DMS detects it and establishes a bidirectional IPC connection. That connection enables several shell integrations:

• Full Event CRUD: You can now create, edit, and delete events directly within the shell calendar overview.
• Reminders Routing: Upcoming-event notifications are delivered natively through the DMS notification system.
• Offline Cache: Managed via a local SQLite cache database so agenda views work offline, syncing back as soon as connection is re-established.
• Secure Keyring Storage: OAuth tokens and secrets are stored directly in your system keyring (GNOME Keyring/KWallet) instead of plaintext files.
• Keyboard Navigation: Full arrow-key navigation for managing calendar events.
• Fully On Device: DankCalendar runs entirely on-device, connecting directly to your providers.

The DMS calendar provider is configurable for backwards compatibility with Khal, so users can continue to use the khal backend if desired.

Integrated Task Planner​

In addition to task/reminder/VTODO integration from DankCalendar, a local to-do and task planner widget has been added to the calendar overview, contributed by goatnath (PR #2583). It manages your to-do lists and task states from within the shell calendar panel.

Greeter Enhancements​

DMS 1.5 adds a settings GUI, multi-user account management, and per-user theme sync to the greeter.

• Settings GUI: Manage dms-greeter and greetd settings without editing config files by hand.
• Improved PAM Support: PAM authentication for fingerprint readers and U2F devices, with timeout recovery and unlock-state sync.
• User Accounts: A Users tab in DMS Settings creates accounts - username, initial password, and optional wheel/sudo privileges and greeter-group access - and lists every human user on the system with their UID, GECOS, and group membership.
• Behavior Toggles: Remember the last user, remember the last session, and auto-login.
• Greeter Appearance: Per-greeter font family, 24-hour clock, seconds display, hour padding, and date format presets, separate from the lock screen settings.
• Custom Greeter Wallpaper: A login screen background independent of your desktop wallpaper, with the same fill-mode options.
• Sync Pending Indicator: A floating pill appears at the bottom of the tab when there are unsaved changes, so you can apply them without scrolling back to the top.
• Per-User Theme Sync: Each account gets an independent cache slot, so users can sync their own login-screen appearance - theme, wallpaper (light/dark/per-monitor variants), custom theme files, and profile picture - without system-wide sudo.
  • dms greeter sync pushes the primary user's full theme, wallpaper, and auth config.
  • dms greeter sync --profile syncs just one greeter-group user's slot, without touching the global config.
  • A Sync button in Settings handles both modes, falling back to a terminal when sudo isn't available.

Window Rules Manager​

DMS 1.5 adds a Window Rules Manager for controlling window behaviors across Hyprland, Niri, and MangoWM.

A dedicated settings page allows viewing, editing, and creating window rules. A new IPC allows creating a window rule for the currently focused window.

Display Profiles​

DMS 1.5 adds Display Profiles: saved monitor layouts that DMS can switch between automatically as outputs are connected or disconnected.

• Automatic Switching: DMS matches the connected set of outputs to a saved profile and applies it, so docking, undocking, or plugging in an external display restores the right layout.
• Control Center Widget: A Display Profiles widget switches layouts without opening Settings.
• Fractional Scaling Presets: Hyprland setups gain fractional scaling display presets.
• Disabled Outputs: Profiles can leave specific outputs turned off.

Hyprland Lua Configuration​

DMS 1.5 moves all Hyprland default configurations to the new Lua format. When DMS deploys configs for Hyprland (via dms setup or dankinstall), it generates native Lua files instead of the older .conf format. This applies to all DMS-managed configurations such as key binds and monitor/output configurations. See the Hyprland configuration guide for details.

Enhanced MangoWM Support​

DMS 1.5 adds better support for the MangoWM compositor across the shell, installer, and UI tools. dms setup now deploys MangoWM configurations and dankinstall supports MangoWM as a compositor option.

Material 3 Shadows & Elevation​

To support Frame Mode, the Material 3 elevation and shadow system was reworked so shadows stay consistent across connected, floating, and overlapping surfaces. A global shadow toggle lives in the Themes tab, with light/dark overrides and independent shadow controls per Dank Bar.

Spotlight - Lightweight Launcher​

DMS 1.5 introduces Spotlight, a lightweight overlay launcher for minimalist setups. It sits in the center of your screen and searches files, folders, applications, and settings.

• Search Persistence: Spotlight persists your last search query and highlights it on open, contributed by Legend-017 (PR #2726).
• Prefix Queries: Use /d and /f prefix tags to narrow the search to directories and files when dsearch is installed.

Notepad Rewritten with Standalone Window & Mime-Type Registration​

The Notepad utility has been rewritten with the ability to convert it into a standalone window and back to a surface. Additionally mime-type registration has been added so DMS Notepad can be (optionally) used as a default text editor for files.

Native Tailscale Integration​

DMS 1.5 adds native Tailscale support inside the Control Center. Instead of custom scripts or command-line wrappers, DMS talks directly to the local Tailscale daemon for full VPN controls.

• Connection Toggle: Connect or disconnect your tailnet from the Control Center.
• Exit Node Selector: A dropdown lists the available exit nodes on your tailnet to route your traffic through.
• LAN Access Toggle: Allow or disallow local network access when connected to an exit node, so you can still reach local devices.
• Node Details: Shows your active Tailscale IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) and connection quality indicators.

System Management​

DMS 1.5 pulls more of the system into the shell, so you can manage updates, power, autostart, and default apps without leaving your desktop.

• System Updater: Check for and apply system updates from the shell, with multiple package-manager backends and polkit authentication for privileged operations.
• Power Profiles: Switch between power-saver, balanced, and performance profiles from the Control Center or by scrolling the battery widget. A cycleProfile IPC command is bound to Mod+P by default.
• XDG Autostart: A new Autostart tab in Settings manages the applications that launch at login, following the XDG autostart specification.
• Default Apps: A Default Apps page in Settings sets your preferred applications for file types and URL schemes.
• User Session Switching: Switch between local user sessions directly from the shell.

Plugin Ranking, Moderation, and Community Feedback​

With 230+ community plugins in the registry, DMS 1.5 introduces a ranking and feedback system so the best plugins rise to the top. Every plugin now has a tracking issue in the dms-plugin-registry that doubles as a forum and voting surface, and the plugins directory displays all of the new metadata affiliated with plugins.

• Upvotes: Anyone with a GitHub account can 👍 a plugin's issue to upvote it. The plugins page ranks by upvotes by default, so popular plugins surface first.
• Sorting & Filtering: Sort by upvotes, last updated, date added, name, or random, with an ascending/descending toggle, plus filters for reviewed-only and first-party-only plugins.
• Status Badges: Plugins can be flagged reviewed, broken, unmaintained, or deprecated, surfaced as badges both on the web page and in the in-shell plugin browser.
• Moderator & Author Commands: Catalog moderators apply status flags via bot commands on the issue, and a plugin's own author can self-flag their plugin /unmaintained (seeking a new maintainer) or /deprecated (superseded by another plugin or a built-in DMS feature).

Browse and vote on plugins at plugins.danklinux.com.

Huge thanks to hthienloc for working through the existing plugin registry to review and significantly improve the quality of the plugin ecosystem!

If you wish to contribute as a plugin moderator, refer to this ticket for details.

Other Notable Features​

DMS 1.5 also brings a wide array of enhancements and options across other components of the shell:

Launcher & Clipboard​

• Plugin Browser Screenshot Previews: The plugin browser now displays inline screenshot previews while browsing, alongside brand new sorting and filtering controls.
• Launcher QOL Improvements: Grid mode now supports Ctrl+H/L navigation (contributed by kanghengliu, PR #2688), toggleable color-picker entries (lambdaclan, PR #2667), and the option to hide package source badges (hthienloc, PR #2676).
• Clipboard Type Filtering: The clipboard history popout can now filter between Text, Image, and pinned entries, contributed by dionjoshualobo (PR #2640).
• Launcher History: The launcher keeps a history of recent entries (PR #2086).
• Terminal Multiplexer Launcher: A launcher mode for opening and attaching to terminal multiplexer sessions (PR #1687).
• Clipboard Editor & Search: Edit saved clipboard entries and search or filter clipboard history (PR #2492, PR #2464).

Network & Power​

• Secret Service Integration: Auto-retrieves and unlocks WiFi/VPN credentials directly from D-Bus Secret Service backends.
• Saved Wi-Fi & Progress: WiFi connection progress indicators (contributed by NihilDigit, PR #2684) and a dedicated saved-networks editor tab (contributed by jbwfu, PR #2648) are now integrated, alongside a subtab network layout (PR #2633).
• Network Link Rate Reporting: DMS now reports the negotiated link speed when connected, providing accurate bandwidth context rather than theoretical maximums.
• Battery Settings Tab: A new battery management section in settings with toggles for remaining time, percentage display, and critical alerts was designed by hthienloc (PR #2634).
• Battery Refresh Rate: Automatically lower display refresh rates on battery power to conserve energy, contributed by atimofeev (PR #2428).
• Bluetooth Status: Added a visual bar indicator for connected Bluetooth devices, contributed by yechielw (PR #2662).
• Bluetooth Trust/Untrust: Control trusted status of Bluetooth devices directly from the Control Center.

Privacy & Security​

• Screen Casting Detection on Niri: The privacy indicator now correctly detects active screen casting sessions on the Niri compositor via PipeWire (PR #2185).
• Night Mode & OSD Restoration: Night mode and OSD surfaces are now correctly restored after system resume from suspend (PR #2254).

Lock Screen​

• Lock Screen IME Bypass: Implemented a direct keyboard layout and input method bypass for lock screen password fields, avoiding login failure due to layout mismatches (contributed by awerty-noob, PR #2609).
• Lockout Feedback: Rather than showing generic errors, the lock screen now queries and displays explicit faillock lockout reasons, contributed by Rocho-EL-Locho (PR #2669).
• Fingerprint/U2F Auth: Lock screen fingerprint and U2F authentication has been restored and hardened with timeout recovery and unlock-state sync (PR #2052).
• Video Wallpapers: Support for video files as a screen-saving background when the lock screen activates.
• Declarative NixOS Auto-Login: Added native support for configuring greeter auto-login declaratively within NixOS modules (PR #2734).

Odds & Ends​

A handful of smaller fixes and quality-of-life touches, several from the community:

• DankDash Drag-n-Drop: Rearrange dashboard tabs and widget layout, with visibility toggles in Settings.
• System Tray Icon Tinting: Tint overrides keep tray icons consistent with your Material theme (PR #2266).
• Animated GIF Profile Pictures: The user avatar now supports animated GIFs (PR #1804).
• Tilde Expansion in Config Paths: ~ now expands in all user-provided file paths (PR #2242).
• dms randr Command: Query physical monitor scale factors without opening the display configurator.
• Per-Screen Focus: The focused app widget tracks only the focused window on its own screen in multi-monitor setups (PR #2152).
• Do Not Disturb & Idle Inhibitor Indicators: New Control Center button indicators for do-not-disturb and idle-inhibitor state (PR #2513).
• Microphone Volume OSD: An interactive microphone volume OSD with IPC controls (PR #2406).
• Locale Hot-Reload: Change the shell locale and have it apply without a restart (PR #1817).
• Neovim Theme Engine: A rebuilt Neovim theme engine for Matugen color sync (PR #1985).
• GeoClue2 Location: Optional GeoClue2 location as an alternative to IP-based location (PR #1856).

Headless Installation​

The dankinstall installer can now run fully unattended - no TUI, scriptable for provisioning, dotfile bootstraps, and CI. Passing --compositor and --term switches it into headless mode:

dankinstall --compositor niri --term ghostty --yes

Choose niri, hyprland, or mango for the compositor and ghostty, kitty, or alacritty for the terminal. Additional flags give you control over the rest of the install: --include-deps / --exclude-deps to tune optional dependencies (like dms-greeter), --replace-configs (or --replace-configs-all) to deploy named configs, and --yes to auto-confirm every prompt. Install logs are written to $DANKINSTALL_LOG (falling back to /var/tmp) and streamed to stdout.

Available Distributions​

See the installation guide for setup instructions.

Upgrade Notes​

(Breaking) App ID Change​

The DMS app ID is now com.danklinux.dms. If you have compositor window rules targeting the old app ID, you'll need to update them to the new ID.

Quickshell 0.3.0+ Required​

DMS 1.5 requires Quickshell 0.3.0 or newer; support for 0.2 has been dropped. If you install via the Dank Linux repositories or dankinstall, this is handled for you - otherwise update Quickshell before upgrading DMS.

Bug Fixes and Improvements​

Community Contributors​

DMS 1.5, and the hotfix series leading up to it, would not be possible without the contributions of the wider community. A huge thank you to everyone who opened a PR, filed a detailed issue, tested a fix, or helped translate the shell.

Quick Acknowledgements​

• Special thanks to our NixOS Maintainers, LuckShiba and EricDraven, for their numerous contributions to DMS overall and maintaining the NixOS Community!

• If you were missed we're sorry! It's hard to keep track of everything sometimes, reach out on Discord or Github and we'll make sure to add you to the list.*

Feature Contributors​

General Contributions​

Resources​

Special thanks to YaLTeR for collaborating with the DMS team, for niri - the compositor that inspired DMS, and for hosting DMS on the niri Discord.

DankCalendar is a solution for calendar management on Linux that unifies Local, Google, Microsoft, CalDAV, and iCloud calendars into a single agenda. It features background synchronization, native event reminders, secure credential storage, a comprehensive GUI, keyboard-driven navigation, and a scriptable IPC interface. It is available now on every DankLinux-supported distro: Arch (AUR), Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

Built into DMS v1.5​

DMS v1.5 detects a running dcal daemon and uses it as a calendar backend over IPC, with no extra setup.

• Unified agenda in DankDash. The calendar card shows your real events from every connected account, color-coded per calendar.
• Create and edit events from the shell. You can add, edit, and delete events right in DankDash. The old khal integration was read-only, so this is new.
• Keyboard navigation throughout. Move around the agenda, open event details, and dismiss it all from the keyboard.
• Native reminders. Upcoming-event notifications come through the DMS notification system you already use.
• A backend selector lives in Settings > Time & Weather (Auto, khal, or DankCalendar), along with a Launch DankCalendar button.

If dcal isn't running, DMS falls back to khal, so nothing breaks.

Credentials and data​

There's no DankLinux server involved. dcal talks to Google, Microsoft, your CalDAV or iCloud host, or your local .ics files directly, so your events and tokens never leave your machine. For Google and Microsoft you create your own OAuth app, so the whole connection is yours.

• Credentials go in your system keyring (e.g. GNOME Keyring, KWallet) rather than your config files. If no keyring is available, dcal falls back to an encrypted on-disk store.
• Synced calendars and events are cached in a local SQLite database under ~/.local/share/dankcal/, following the XDG base directory spec. Everything works offline, and sync catches up when you're back online.
• The daemon listens on a per-user Unix socket in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, scoped to your login session. It's not a network port.

Getting Started​

DankCalendar ships as dankcalendar-git, a rolling build from upstream master, across the DankLinux repositories. On Arch you can also use the prebuilt dankcalendar-bin AUR package.

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S dankcalendar-bin    # prebuilt binary
# or
yay -S dankcalendar-git    # build from latest git

Fedora & CentOS (COPR)

sudo dnf copr enable avengemedia/danklinux
sudo dnf install dankcalendar-git

Debian (OBS) and Ubuntu (PPA) first enable the DankLinux repository, then:

sudo apt install dankcalendar-git

openSUSE (OBS)

sudo zypper install dankcalendar-git

Repository setup commands for each Debian release, Ubuntu, and openSUSE variant are in the installation guide. You can also build from source with git clone and make install.

You can connect accounts from the GUI or the CLI.

dcal run                  # Launch DankCalendar
dcal account add google   # or microsoft, caldav, icloud, local

DankCalendar runs as a daemon, so closing the window only hides it and sync and reminders keep running in the tray - you can change the close behavior in settings. Enable Start at login from Settings, or install the systemd user service.

See the DankCalendar documentation for full installation, account setup, and IPC reference.

Updates since v0.1​

DankCalendar has moved quickly since the initial release. v0.2.0 is the latest; here are the headline additions from v0.1.1 through v0.2.0.

Calendar sources​

• iCal feeds and webcal URLs — Subscribe to public calendar feeds and open webcal:// links directly.
• Evolution Data Server — Read calendars already managed by GNOME Evolution without duplicating account setup.

Tasks, events, and reminders​

• Tasks and reminders (VTODO) — View and manage tasks from every connected provider, not just calendar events.
• Event RSVP — Accept or decline invitations from inside DankCalendar.
• Meeting links — Video call URLs are parsed from events and shown in event details and reminders.
• Event-driven reminders — The reminder scheduler wakes on upcoming events instead of polling on a fixed interval.

UI and navigation​

• Theme engine — Custom themes plus a native colorscheme watcher that follows your system light/dark preference.
• Sidebar — Resizable, collapsible, and scrollable, with long calendar names elided cleanly.
• Month view — Scroll through dense months and expand a day to see every event when a cell overflows.
• Day and week views — A time-of-day indicator marks your current position in the schedule.
• View shortcuts — Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+5 jump between agenda views.
• Quick create — Double-click a time slot to start a new event.
• Close behavior — Choose whether the window close button hides DankCalendar or quits entirely.

IPC and integration​

• Open in a specific view — IPC can show the calendar already focused on month, week, day, or agenda.

Translations​

• More languages — Dutch, Italian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian (with RTL), Polish, and Chinese Simplified.

See the full release history on GitHub for version-by-version notes.

Why a new Linux calendar?​

It fits the Dank philosophy of focused tools (dgop, dsearch) that do one thing well and integrate together, without unnecessary dependencies or assumptions about your setup. The calendar is a core part of the user experience, so it deserves a first-party solution that works well with the shell and with your existing accounts.

khal and vdirsyncer are scriptable and lightweight, but they're two tools you wire together yourself. You write a vdirsyncer config, set up OAuth tokens by hand, run sync on a cron, then point khal at the output. It's not a user-friendly or comprehensive solution.

Evolution and Evolution Data Server are powerful, but they're tied to the GNOME desktop and incredibly difficult to build on or integrate with. The calendar is just one part of a huge suite of apps sharing the EDS backend.

• The calendar is buried inside an Outlook-style suite, and account setup is spread across GNOME Settings, GNOME Online Accounts, and Evolution itself, so it's never clear which one actually owns a calendar.
• EDS is a shared backend, which is a good idea, but its API is GObject/C with async GLib and very few real examples. Writing a launcher widget, a shell card, or a CLI against it means digging through source-registry concepts and ECalClient instead of calling something simple.
• It drags in a heavy GTK and WebKitGTK stack and assumes you're on GNOME, which is awkward on niri, Hyprland, Sway, KDE, or a custom shell.

DankCalendar keeps the good part of that idea, one synced backend that lots of things can read, but makes it pleasant to use and to build on: sign-in style account setup, a local cache that works offline, a documented IPC API (dcal ipc events.list, events.create, and so on) with JSON output, and a daemon-plus-frontends design that behaves the same on any compositor.

Resources​

We're excited to announce DankMaterialShell (DMS) 1.4 "Saffron Bloom"! This release introduces a brand new launcher, numerous improvements to the plugin system which enables GIFs, KDE Connect, Clight, and a lot of new possibilities for extending DMS features and capabilities.

Dank Launcher V2​

DMS 1.4 introduces a new vicinae-inspired launcher, with many more options, tighter extension integrations, better performance, configurable tab-actions, new tiled layout option, and numerous new first-party plugins including GIF and Sticker searchs.

• Plugins can define context menu and custom tab actions, shift+enter action (such as paste-and-close), and new types of results such as animated images.
• New tiled layout option for the launcher.
• New first-party plugins including GIF and Sticker search.
• Hide or show any extension from "all" tab, change priority-order, keep custom triggers, and configure more launcher options in DMS settings.
• Edit launch options, environment, or hide entries inline from the launcher.

KDE Connect+Valent (Phone Connect), and Clight Integration​

DMS v1.4 exposes a dbus client that enables plugins to interact with dbus services natively, which has enabled the development of KDE Connect+Valent and Clight plugins.

Phone Connect plugin allows you to connect to your phone via KDE Connect or Valent (gnome-based equivalent) directly from DMS. Receive notifications, send and receive files, synchronize clipboard, view phone battery percentage in the bar, and more.

Clight plugin gives integration with Clight which is an auto-brightness daemon.

The new dbus client allows creating an entirely new category of plugins that can interact with any dbus service, which opens up a huge range of possibilities for extensions that need to integrate with other applications and system services - in an efficient, event-driven way.

New Process List/System Monitor​

The dgop frontend/process monitor has gotten an overhaul with a new, more functional design. Integrated search, full command view, and more relevant information in a single view.

Window Rule Manager (niri-only)​

niri users can now manage window rules directly from DMS. An optional keybind can be used dms ipc call window-rules toggle to create a rule for the currently focused window. All rules can be re-ordered, edited, and managed from DMS settings.

Dock Enhancements & Dank Bar Dock Widget​

Intelligent Auto-Hide​

The dock can now auto-hide itself only when floating windows overlap its area, and reveal when they don't. You get the screen space back when you need it without losing quick access.

Dank Bar Apps Dock Widget​

New Apps Dock widget for Dank Bar — a standalone dock embedded directly in the bar. If you prefer a panel-only workflow without the full dock, this gives you pinned and running apps right in your bar.

Max Pinned & Running Apps with Overflow​

You can now set max counts for pinned and running apps separately. Anything beyond the limit collapses into an expandable overflow area with a badge count. Works on both the main dock and the new Apps Dock widget.

Audio Device Aliases​

Built-in Audio Device Aliases powered by WirePlumber. Rename any input or output from Audio Settings, hide devices you never use, and if needed — push a device above 100% temporarily. Original names are kept so you can always revert.

• Rename devices: Give your devices actual useful names. Original hardware names are preserved.
• Hide devices: Get rid of unused or duplicate entries cluttering your lists.
• Amplify beyond 100%: Bump max volume when you need it. Note: excessive amplification may cause distortion or hardware issues, use with caution.

Automatic Light and Dark Mode​

Your desktop theme can now switch between light and dark automatically. Set a simple time schedule, or let DMS figure it out from your location (manual coordinates or IP-based). Location mode shows a preview of when the next transition will happen.

• Time-based mode: Set sunrise/sunset or custom times.
• Location-based mode: Manual coordinates or IP geolocation to calculate local sunrise/sunset.
• Gamma Control sync: Tie it into DMS Gamma Control Night Mode so color temperature, brightness, and theme all switch together.
• Quick override: Force light or dark from the Appearance menu anytime; automatic rules kick back in after.

Notification Enhancements​

Notifications got a visual overhaul based on Material 3 Expressive — new shadows, motion, and overall feel. The notification center and toasts both look and behave better.

What's new:

• Independent animation speed: Notification animations are now separate from global UI motion, so you can make them snappier or slower without touching everything else.
• Privacy mode: Hide message content by default (shows sender and app only), click to reveal. Useful if you share your screen or just want less distraction.
• Right-click actions: Right-click any notification to Mute the source, Create a rule, or Dismiss. Works on both toasts and in the Notification Center.

More updates to come!

Miracle WM Support​

Miracle WM is now a supported compositor.

DMS 1.4 brings full support for Miracle WM, including keybind cheatsheets, idle monitor integration, workspace switcher, and the rest of the core DMS feature.

This is ahead of the upcoming Fedora 44 release which will include a Dank Miracle spin, so Miracle WM users on Fedora will have DMS available out of the box.

Available Distributions​

DMS is available for Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, NixOS, Gentoo, and more. Gentoo users have three community overlays to choose from: quilat-overlay (live ebuild tracking git master, OpenRC + systemd), tdgentoo (versioned ebuild pinned to stable releases), and dacyberduck (dank-base/dankmaterialshell).

See the installation guide for setup instructions.

Bug Fixes and Improvements​

Resources​

Special thanks to YaLTeR for collaborating with the DMS team, for niri - the compositor that inspired DMS, and for hosting DMS on the niri Discord.

We're excited to announce DankMaterialShell (DMS) 1.2 "Spicy Miso"! This release features numerous new features and major improvements to both the DMS core and plugin system.

What's New​

Desktop Widgets & Plugins​

DMS 1.2 introduces Desktop Widgets - small applets that live on your desktop, below windows and above your wallpaper. Position, resize, and configure them per-display.

Clock Built-in

Analog & digital modes

System Monitor Built-in

CPU, memory, GPU, temps & more

Weather Plugin

by Avenge Media

Media Player Plugin

by Abdur Rahman Rifat

App Shortcuts Plugin

by Omar (@oabragh)

Desktop Command Plugin

by yayuuu

The plugin system makes building your own widgets straightforward - see the plugin development guide to get started.

Theme Registry​

DMS 1.2 introduces a theme system where a single theme can have multiple variants and accent colors. The plugin registry now includes a Theme Registry with community-developed themes available for easy installation. Learn how to contribute your own themes.

Native Clipboard and History​

Full, zero-dependency clipboard and clipboard history integration.

• No dependency on external tools, such as cliphist or wl-clipboard.
• Configurable max entry size, retention duration, and automatic cleanup.
• Search API and CLI with pagination, filtering by text, images, or any mime type.
• Automatically ignores data from password managers (such as KeepassXC and 1Password). Preventing sensitive data from being stored in the clipboard history.
• Export & import functionality
• Migration tool for transferring history from cliphist.

Monitor Configurator​

Configure display settings directly from DMS Settings. Available for niri, Hyprland, and MangoWC. Includes positioning, resolution, refresh rate, VRR, full layout customization (niri), HDR (Hyprland), scaling, mirroring (Hyprland), and more.

Notification Improvements​

Notifications get several new features and improvements:

• Configurable history with variable size, expirations, and auto-cleanup
• Gestures to dismiss notifications
• Ability to display on lock screen (count only, name only, or full content - based on privacy preference)

Cursor & Layout Configuration​

Customize your compositor settings directly from DMS Settings. Available for niri, Hyprland, and MangoWC:

• Cursor - Choose from available cursor themes, adjust size, and configure compositor-specific hiding behavior (hide on typing, hide on touch, inactive timeout)
• Gaps - Adjust gaps around windows
• Borders & Corner Radius - Override theme defaults for window border width and corner radius
• Focus Ring - Customize focus ring color, width, and style

Cursor settings are automatically applied to XWayland applications via XResources, ensuring consistent appearance across native Wayland and XWayland apps.

DMS Doctor​

New dms doctor command for diagnosing configuration issues and conflicts that may negatively affect DMS feature availability or performance. Also available via DMS GUI.

Shout out to @LuckShiba for the contribution!

Keyboard Shortcuts Editor for niri, Hyprland & MangoWC​

The world famous DMS keyboard shortcuts tool is now available for niri, Hyprland, and MangoWC. Search, edit, and add new keybinds directly from DMS Settings.

Settings Search​

New settings search makes it easier to find what you want to change. Includes integrated launcher search with ? by default.

i18n: RTL Support​

DMS 1.2 introduces proper support for right-to-left languages with proper layout mirroring across components. DMS currently has translations for Hebrew and Farsi.

To contribute to translations see the pinned github issue

Launcher Improvements​

The DMS launcher has undergone several improvements. Performance improvements, support for plugins to define context menus (with full keyboard navigation), built-in settings search, and a new first-party plugin for searching keybinds (niri, Hyprland, MangoWC, Sway, and custom providers via dms keybinds).

DMS' launcher with plugins supports calculator, niri window management, CLI commands with history, emoji and gitmoji search, web search, extremely fast indexed filesystem search, and more. It also work on the niri overview without any triggers needed.

Debian SID, OpenSUSE Slowroll, Leap 16.0, and CentOS Stream 10 Packages​

DMS 1.2 expands distribution support with official packages now available for:

• Debian SID - Rolling release packages via OBS
• OpenSUSE Slowroll - Packages via OBS
• OpenSUSE Leap 16.0 - Packages via OBS
• CentOS Stream 10 - Packages via COPR

These are in addition to existing packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and NixOS.

Packages include DMS, niri, quickshell, dgop, dsearch, and other core dependencies. See the installation guide for setup instructions.

Upgrade Notes​

(Breaking) Theme Updates​

Ghostty and VSCode theming have changed and will stop working without manual intervention.

# ~/.config/ghostty/config
# Add this
theme = dankcolors

# ! Remove this
# config-file = ./config-dankcolors

Clipboard History Migration​

Steps are recommended to remove existing clipboard history daemon and migrate existing history to the new DMS clipboard system.

// ~/.config/niri/config.kdl
spawn-at-startup "wl-paste --watch cliphist store" // REMOVE THIS LINE

# ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf
exec-once = wl-paste --watch cliphist store # REMOVE THIS LINE

# First stop DMS
systemctl --user stop dms # Or dms kill, if not using systemd
# Run migration (optionally override path with cliphist-migrate /path/to/db)
dms cl cliphist-migrate
# Start DMS again
systemctl --user start dms # or dms run -d, if not using systemd

# DMS clipboard CLI has feature-parity with wl-clipboard
# To copy text:
echo "Hello, World!" | dms cl copy
# To paste text:
dms cl paste

Compositor Configuration Updates​

For niri or Hyprland you can run dms setup to generate a new compositor configuration - monitor configuration will be preserved and original configuration will be backed up. The main change is migrating to a more modular configuration.

Changes are required only if you wish to use the new cursor, output, layout, and keybind controls from DMS Settings.

mkdir -p ~/.config/niri/dms
touch ~/.config/niri/dms/cursor.kdl
touch ~/.config/niri/dms/outputs.kdl

// ~/.config/niri/dms/cursor.kdl
// Move cursor {} block from config.kdl
cursor {
    xcursor-theme "Bibata-Original-Ice"
    xcursor-size 24
}

// ~/.config/niri/dms/outputs.kdl
// Move output {} blocks from config.kdl
output "DP-1" {
    position 0 0
    scale 1.0
    transform normal
}

// ~/.config/niri/config.kdl
// Recommended to place at the end of the file
include "dms/cursor.kdl"
include "dms/outputs.kdl"
include "dms/layout.kdl"

mkdir -p ~/.config/hypr/dms
touch ~/.config/hypr/dms/cursor.conf
touch ~/.config/hypr/dms/outputs.conf
touch ~/.config/hypr/dms/layout.conf
touch ~/.config/hypr/dms/binds.conf

# ~/.config/hypr/dms/cursor.conf
# Move cursor settings from hyprland.conf
env = HYPRCURSOR_THEME,Bibata-Original-Ice
env = HYPRCURSOR_SIZE,24
env = XCURSOR_THEME,Bibata-Original-Ice
env = XCURSOR_SIZE,24

# ~/.config/hypr/dms/outputs.conf
# Move monitor lines from hyprland.conf
monitor = DP-1,2560x1440@144,0x0,1

# ~/.config/hypr/dms/layout.conf
# Move general layout settings from hyprland.conf
general {
    gaps_in = 5
    gaps_out = 10
    border_size = 2
}

# ! Binds do not need to be moved, only edited/new binds via GUI will be stored here

# ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf
# Recommended to place at the end of the file
source = ./dms/cursor.conf
source = ./dms/outputs.conf
source = ./dms/layout.conf
source = ./dms/binds.conf

mkdir -p ~/.config/mangowc/dms
touch ~/.config/mangowc/dms/cursor.conf
touch ~/.config/mangowc/dms/outputs.conf
touch ~/.config/mangowc/dms/layout.conf
touch ~/.config/mangowc/dms/binds.conf

# ~/.config/mangowc/dms/cursor.conf
# Move cursor settings from mangowc.conf
cursor_size=24
cursor_theme=Bibata-Original-Ice

# ~/.config/mangowc/dms/outputs.conf
# Move output blocks from mangowc.conf
monitorrule=DP-2,0.55,1,tile,0,1,0,0,2560,1440,144
monitorrule=eDP-1,0.55,1,tile,0,1,2560,0,2560,1600,240

# ~/.config/mangowc/dms/layout.conf
# Move layout settings from mangowc.conf
border_radius=13
gappih=4
gappiv=4
gappoh=4
gappov=4
borderpx=2

# ~/.config/mangowc/dms/binds.conf
# Moving binds is not required, only edited/new binds via GUI will be stored here

# ~/.config/mangowc/mangowc.conf
# Recommended to place at the end of the file
source = ./dms/cursor.conf
source = ./dms/outputs.conf
source = ./dms/layout.conf
source = ./dms/binds.conf

NixOS Updates​

DMS 1.2 brings significant improvements to NixOS integration and the flake-based installation experience:

Home Manager Module Enhancements

• New clipboardSettings option for declarative clipboard configuration
• Plugins can now include per-plugin settings directly in their configuration
• Removed default* settings options in favor of being able to set the actual settings file
• Improved plugin installation and management through home-manager module

NixOS Module Improvements

• Added plugin support in NixOS module with declarative installation
• Enabled power-profiles-daemon and accounts-daemon by default for better power management and user account integration
• QML dependencies are now properly included in dms-shell package

Niri Integration

• Added support for config includes with niri-flake. DMS-generated configuration files now work seamlessly with niri's flake-based setup

Plugin Registry Flake

• New dms-plugin-registry Nix flake provides all community plugins as packages
• Plugins are automatically updated daily from the registry
• Simple declarative installation - just enable plugins by their ID
• Works with both NixOS and Home Manager modules

Please check the documentation for more information in how to configure DMS 1.2 with the new features.

Bug Fixes and Improvements​

Resources​

Special thanks to YaLTeR for collaborating with the DMS team, for niri - the compositor that inspired DMS, and for hosting DMS on the niri Discord.

We are pre-announcing this feature to highlight the plugin ecosystem and to encourage the community to build these new types of widgets.

What Are Desktop Widgets?​

Desktop widgets are small, interactive components that live below windows and above your desktop wallpaper. With these new widgets, you can add useful information and tools to your desktop without cluttering your workspace.

They can be positioned, placed, and sized per-display.

With the DMS plugin system, these widgets are extremely easy to build so we are looking forward to seeing what the community creates! We hope to feature some community widgets in the next 1.2 release.

Built-in Desktop Widgets​

DMS 1.2 will ship with two built-in desktop widgets:

Clock​

A configurable clock with configurable analog and digital modes, modeled after the Material expressive clock widgets.

System Monitor (dgop)​

A configurable system monitor that can display CPU, memory, GPU, disk, network, process, temperature, and other system information in a variety of formats.

Desktop Widget Plugins​

There is one first-party plugin that is now available on the registry: Dank Desktop Weather (requires DMS git/nightly). This plugin adds a weather widget to your desktop that shows current weather conditions and forecasts.

Building Your Own​

Making your own desktop widget is straight forward. If you've written javascript and a declarative layout (something like react, vue, json, etc) - it should not feel too foreign.

1. Create the plugin folder​

mkdir -p ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/MyDesktopWidget
cd ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/MyDesktopWidget

2. Write the manifest​

Save as plugin.json:

{
  "id": "myDesktopWidget",
  "name": "My Desktop Widget",
  "description": "A custom desktop widget",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "author": "Your Name",
  "type": "desktop",
  "license": "<your-license-here>",
  "component": "./MyWidget.qml",
  "icon": "widgets",
  "settings": "./MySettings.qml",
  "requires_dms": ">=1.2.0"
}

The key bit is "type": "desktop" - that tells DMS this is a desktop widget, not a bar widget.

3. Create the widget​

Save as MyWidget.qml:

import QtQuick
import qs.Common
import qs.Widgets
import qs.Modules.Plugins

DesktopPluginComponent {
    id: root

    minWidth: 150
    minHeight: 100

    property string displayText: pluginData.displayText ?? "Hello!"
    property real bgOpacity: (pluginData.backgroundOpacity ?? 80) / 100

    Rectangle {
        anchors.fill: parent
        radius: Theme.cornerRadius
        color: Theme.withAlpha(Theme.surfaceContainer, root.bgOpacity)

        StyledText {
            anchors.centerIn: parent
            text: root.displayText
            color: Theme.surfaceText
            font.pixelSize: Theme.fontSizeLarge
        }
    }
}

Users can right-click and drag to move or resize the widget. The minWidth/minHeight properties set the lower bounds.

4. Create the settings panel​

Save as MySettings.qml:

import QtQuick
import qs.Common
import qs.Modules.Plugins

PluginSettings {
    id: root
    pluginId: "myDesktopWidget"

    StringSetting {
        settingKey: "displayText"
        label: "Display Text"
        description: "Text shown in the widget"
        placeholder: "Enter text"
        defaultValue: "Hello!"
    }

    SliderSetting {
        settingKey: "backgroundOpacity"
        label: "Background Opacity"
        defaultValue: 80
        minimum: 0
        maximum: 100
        unit: "%"
    }
}

Display settings (position, size, which monitors) are injected automatically - you don't need to handle those yourself.

5. Load it​

1. Open Settings → Plugins
2. Click Scan for Plugins
3. Toggle your plugin on
4. Open Settings → Widgets and enable the widget on your desired display

That's it. For settings panels, timers, graphs, and more - check out the full plugin development guide.

Get Involved​

We hope to see the plugin registry grow with new desktop widgets. Some ideas that would be great as desktop widgets:

• Media controls (mpris, spotify, etc)
• Todo lists
• Stock/Crypto tickers
• News feeds

Submit plugins to the plugin registry - we hope to feature some of them in the next DMS release.

Desktop widgets land in DMS 1.2. Keep an eye on the repo and join the Discord if you want to get started early.

We're excited to announce DankMaterialShell (DMS) 1.0! ~ DMS is a Desktop Shell for Wayland Compositors built with Quickshell & GO.

What started as a small hobby project has grown into a full desktop shell and application suite with thousands of users and dozens of contributors - with first class support for niri, Hyprland, Sway, MangoWC, and LabWC. As well as general support for all compositors implementing select wayland protocols.

This release marks more than just a version number, it's a commitment to stability and predictability. Going forward, DMS will follow a milestone/roadmap-based release cycle, with bug-fix releases as needed in-between major versions.

DMS has come a long way since its inception, and we're excited to pivot towards a more structured development process - which represents a step towards making DMS a mainstream Linux desktop project.

What's New​

OMEGA Bar​

Add up to 4 bar configurations, each with their own set of widgets, layout, and style. Configure which monitor each bar appears on and independently control each bar with new IPCs.

Comprehensive Keyboard Shortcuts (niri)​

Configure global keyboard shortcuts - available to niri users. Requires quickshell version from DankLinux repositories or quickshell-git from AUR.

Printer Management (CUPS)​

Manage printers directly from DMS Settings with CUPS integration. Add, remove, and configure printers with ease. A new control center widget allows viewing printers and managing print jobs.

Comprehensive Network Management​

Comprehensive network view with support for NetworkManager, IWD, and systemd-networkd. Import VPN profiles, manage connections, and connect to Wi-Fi networks.

Polkit Agent​

DMS now includes its own Polkit agent for handling privilege escalation requests. No more need for external polkit agents like polkit-gnome, mate-polkit, or kde-polkit.

File-Type Associations​

Set default applications for different file types and protocols directly from DMS Settings. Easily manage which apps open specific file formats and choose your preferred applications for handling various file types and links. See the desktop integration documentation.

Special thanks to @devnullvoid for the contribution.

Dank Color Picker​

The color picker is not new, but the eye dropper/color picker tool is now built-in to DMS - no more need for third-party tools! It is now integrated into DMS and available as a standalone tool for Wayland compositors. See the CLI color picker documentation.

Dank Screenshot​

DMS now ships with its own screenshot tool - no need for grim, slurp, or grimblast anymore. Capture a region, a single screen, all screens, or currently focused window (Hyprland/MangoWC/DWL only). Save to clipboard, file, stdout, or mix and match. Get notified when it's done. Supports PNG, JPEG, and PPM formats. See the CLI screenshot documentation.

Compatible with many Wayland compositors including Hyprland, Sway, MangoWC, and niri.

DMS Plugin System​

DMS features a powerful plugin system that allows developers and enthusiasts to extend the shell with custom functionality. The plugin ecosystem now includes 26 community-created plugins, with 6 new additions since the v0.6.2 release. From system utilities to creative tools, the plugin system makes it possible to add custom widgets, integrate with external services, or build entirely new features on top of DMS.

Explore the full plugins directory to discover community contributions including wallpaper engines, system monitors, media controls, container management, and more. New plugins are being added regularly as the community continues to build amazing extensions.

Special thanks to rochacbruno for developing and iterating on the plugin system, as well as maintaining the plugin registry.

Packages for Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, CentOS, and Arch Linux​

DMS is now available through the DankLinux Repository with official packages for Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Fedora/CentOS via PPA, OBS, and COPR. Arch Linux users can grab it from the Arch User Repository (AUR).

This includes not only DMS itself but also core dependencies that may be used with or without DMS including:

• niri - Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSUSE (includes xwayland-satellite)
• quickshell - Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Fedora
• dgop - All supported distributions
• dsearch - All supported distributions
• dms-greeter - AUR, Fedora, and Ubuntu (more via DankInstaller)
• matugen - Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Fedora
• cliphist - All supported distributions
• ghostty - Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu

Development packages/nightly builds are also available via the same repositories

Available on nixpkgs​

DMS is now available on nixpkgs unstable. This simplifies installation significantly for NixOS users and those using Nix package manager and represents a major step towards broader adoption. Check the available options on search.nixos.org.

Special thanks to @LuckShiba for creating the nixpkgs package and @marcusramberg for approving!

More than just a Shell​

DMS has become more than just a desktop shell. It is a comprehensive suite of tools that provide core desktop features in a cohesive, integrated way - or as completely standalone utilities to enrich non-DMS desktops.

• DankMaterialShell (qml) - The quickshell-based part of the shell
• DankMaterialShell (go) - A comprehensive backend service and suite of tools
  • Dank16 - A contrast-aware color palette generator for Base16-style themes
  • Matugen - A custom matugen runner that enriches matugen templates with Dank16 and custom colors
  • Brightness - A complete management CLI and socket service for backlight, LED, and ddc/ci brightness control.
  • Networking - Native dbus integration with NetworkManager, IWD, and systemd-networkd for comprehensive network management - including VPNs, WiFi, and Ethernet.
  • Keybinds - A complete keybinds system with pluggable providers for reading and writing keybinds for cheatsheets and management interfaces.
  • Color Picker - A CLI color picker with multiple output formats and an eye dropper tool for Wayland.
  • Screenshot - A complete screenshot tool with region selection, window capture, and multiple output formats.
  • Plugins - A plugin system for extending the shell and launcher with custom functionality.
• dgop - A stateless system monitoring tool with a unique cursor-based approach. CLI and fully documented (With OpenAPI 3.1) REST API.
• dsearch - A blazingly fast, indexed filesystem search server with incremental indexes. Fully configurable - choose depth, folders, exclusions, metadata, content, and more. CLI, Unix Socket, and Rest API.

TL;DR DMS replaces many tools commonly used for Wayland desktops. No brightnessctl, ddcutil, grimblast, nmcli, iwctl, grim, slurp, wofi, fuzzel, swayidle, hyprlock, mate/gnome/kde polkit, mako/dunst, hyprpicker, sddm, or (a bunch of other stuff) needed anymore. Fully optional, and completely standalone from DMS itself.

Bug Fixes and Improvements​

Resources​

Special thanks to YaLTeR for collaborating with the DMS team, for niri - the compositor that inspired DMS, and for hosting DMS on the niri Discord.