Developers at Nitrux recently announced the discontinuation of their NX Desktop, a desktop environment built on top of KDE Plasma 5. The repositories for NX Desktop on Github have been archived as the project comes to an end due to the long-term support being cut for releases of KDE Plasma.
In addition to the termination of NX Desktop, the Maui Shell project has also been put on hold because of resource constraints and lack of community interest. Initially, plans were in place to transition NX Desktop to KDE Plasma 6 technology and develop a new Maui Shell to replace it over time, but this strategy has now changed.
As part of the new direction, Nitrux will be adopting a user environment that leverages the Hyprland composite server, Waybar panels, and wlogout menu for system tasks. Greetd entry manager and qtgreet screen will replace the SDDM display manager.
The Hyprland composite server, which utilizes Wayland, offers various features such as mosaic window layout, window grouping, touchpad gesture controls, and visually appealing interface elements like gradients and animation effects. The Nitrux distribution will also switch from using Liquorix patches to the Nuclei kernel from the Cachyos project to support the PSI mechanism necessary for running Waydroid, a tool for Android applications.
For software installation, Nitrux will introduce nx apphub and appbox tools as replacements for Appimage packages. Distribution updates will now be released bi-weekly, with the nuts utility continuing to be used for updating the system. Future plans include replacing SquashFS with dwarfs and extending support to ARM64 devices in addition to x86_64 architecture.