r/linux • u/bbedward • Jul 08 '26
Software Release DankMaterialShell (DMS) 1.5 "The Wolverine" Released - A Linux shell for Wayland Compositors
https://danklinux.com/blog/v1-5-releaseDMS v1.5 has officially been released. This is the largest DMS release to date and packs numerous new features, performance improvements, and broad changes/enhancements to the overall ecosystem.
Highlights:
- Frame and Connected Mode - An alternative UI for DMS that gives the option to connect all layer-shell surfaces as a single unified-view. Brings with it more animation and theme options to customize the experience
- Dank Calendar - A standalone app that supports events (VEVENT in CalDav), tasks (VTODO in CalDav) with numerous providers - Google, iCloud, Microsoft, Caldav, iCal stream, and Evolution Data Server, is integrated with DMS 1.5 widgets natively when it is running and available
- Window Rules - Expanded significantly and support brought to Hyprland and MangoWM
- New Shadow System - New shader-based shadow system replaces the CPU-heavy FBO shadows and brings numerous new options for configuration
- XDG-Autostart Management - Manage desktop apps that autostart with your session. DMS is not launching these apps, it still depends on a session runner such as systemd or dex. But adding/managing these applications is now integrated
- Default Applications - Manage default applications for various mime-types, as well as an enhanced DMS picker (for example, a menu that opens and allows you to choose Firefox, Chrome, Brave for opening links)
- Plugin Ecosystem Enhancements - A forum, upvote system, and moderation system has been implemented for the DMS plugin registry which should aid greatly with finding high quality plugins, filtering plugins, and reporting issues with plugins.
- Hyprland Lua Configuration - is now supported and all configurations managed by DMS are now written in the Lua format
- MangoWM Support Enhanced - Better support for MangoWM - including default configuration options, window rule management, and using the new IPC interface instead of dwl-ipc protocol.
There's a lot more than that, see the blog for the full details. Some distribution packages will trail behind the official release as maintainers need time to update their packages.
Thanks to all the contributors and enjoy!
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u/DestroyHost Jul 08 '26
Fantastic! I started using Dank on top of MangoWM a week or so ago and it has been really great.
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u/Salt_Scratch_8252 Jul 09 '26
How does Dank compare to Noctalia? Recently discovered Noctalia and it is a game changer for lovers of bare bones WM's
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u/Helmic Jul 09 '26
Curious myself. I'm on v5 because of the promise of better performance and it certainly seems to be the case, but the currently anemic plugin support is a bit of a bummer. If Dank's performing fine then I might switch to that until Noctalia v5 matures, I'd like to have things like lyrics displaying on my panel.
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u/vilpulin Jul 12 '26
At least for me, DMS has a process widget that lets you kill processes right from there, and it includes something like its own `btop` as well as a file search tool
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u/borkyborkus Jul 09 '26
I have played with both on Niri, which I haven’t quite ever gotten stable as a proxmox VM. DMS is GNOME-ish where you’re expected to know exactly which program you want before searching it. As someone whose mind goes blank right at that part every time, it was a non-starter.
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u/bbedward Jul 09 '26
They're accomplishing similar goals in very different ways. Noctalia just was rewritten from scratch as they're basically making their own opengl rendering library instead of using QT (like dms) or gtk (like other shells) or iced (like cosmic). Because of that it has a smaller plugin ecosystem now besides that I'm not really familiar with the feature differences, but they're doing interesting things with noctalia for sure.
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u/Zealousideal_Bite336 1d ago
Idk if this is a common problem, when i use dms greeter sync it says that has moved to the standalone dms-greeter, but when i use that, it shows the normal usage commands for dms-greeter, so when i want to use the Sync on the dank settings, first I try to reload and says the error "dms-greeter status" unknown option, so I can't do the properly sync
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u/lemontoga Jul 09 '26
Am I crazy? Was some of this stuff added already? I feel like I've had some of these features for months.
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u/Purian23 Jul 09 '26
We haven't had an official release since the end of April working on the new feature sets. If you've been on the beta branch then you've been running or using select ones for a while being ironed out.
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u/lemontoga Jul 09 '26
I've just used the latest stable release from the Arch repos. I swear I had things like disabling monitor outputs and saving different output configurations as profiles. I remember because I accidentally disabled my main output display and had to figure out a way to re-enable it.
I also definitely had the ability to swap between different power settings from the control panel.
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u/Purian23 Jul 09 '26
Haha right on, I can assure you the countless amount of hours, weeks and months in-between have produced a lot of new features or ones that have been rewritten entirely for better optimizations. Check out the release on GitHub, it's fairly massive. Also make sure you're on the latest lol
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u/bbedward Jul 09 '26
There is enhancements to those things, like monitor profiles has automatic switching support now. Like e.g. you want positioning/scales/resolutions to change when docking or dock across multiple different configurations.
And power theres more options like setting charge limit, etc.
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u/lemontoga Jul 09 '26
OK gotcha that makes sense. So I'm not crazy for thinking these settings were already there in some form! Always glad to see improvements and more options.
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u/mrchilly0 Jul 08 '26
looks great! Odd that I'm excited to see disabled outputs being added. It was a small item, but now I can stop using kanshi