The Noctalia 5.2 project has been released, offering a user environment that is compatible with various composite managers supporting the Wayland layer-shell protocol, such as Niri, Hyprland, Sway, Scroll, Mango, Labwc, Triad, and dwl. Additionally, the Noctalia developers are working on their own composite manager called Umbriel, which is still in development. The code for this project is written in C++ and is distributed under the MIT license.
The Noctalia project provides a comprehensive environment including a panel, a program launch menu, a configurator, a screen saver, a notification system, a session management system, a clipboard history viewer, a set of widgets, and a login screen. This environment utilizes the Wayland protocol and the OpenGL ES graphics API without relying on toolkits like Qt and GTK. The desktop environment components are being developed as a cohesive stack with a unified design, configuration, and Inter-Process Communication (IPC) system. Settings can be modified in TOML format on the fly without the need to restart the shell.
Noctalia 5.2 offers customizable toolbars, virtual desktops, various layouts for multi-monitor setups, a system tray with multimedia playback controls, network setup options, battery monitoring, volume and brightness controls, and weather forecasting. Over 100 plugins have been developed to enhance functionality, providing additional widgets, program navigation interfaces, panels, background services, extensions to the composite manager, and integration modules with hardware and third-party services.
Some of the changes in Noctalia 5.2 include the support for sound themes from the Freedesktop standard, a redesigned interface for switching between application windows, the implementation of Type-to-launch feature for application searches in the Umbriel composite manager overview mode, a handler for launching panels and configurator tabs, configurable system lock screen effects, custom labels for system operation monitoring widget, and an option to keep the brightness control widget visible on systems where brightness cannot be adjusted.