Desktop

I had been looking at Niri while testing CachyOS. It gave me the satisfaction of a calm, keyboard-friendly Wayland desktop, and that thought stuck with me. Over the last few weeks, I kept thinking about one practical question: How could I rebuild this workflow from my NixOS configuration with DMS and Niri, without recreating the same problems along the way? Niri is the compositor; it decides where windows live. DankMaterialShell, usually shortened to DMS, is the friendly layer around it: panel, launcher, notifications, settings, lock screen integration, wallpaper colors, tray, and a growing set of desktop conveniences. ...

The install itself was not the hard part. The hard part was getting Fedora Plasma 44 to behave like a normal desktop after the install, with Secure Boot still on and NVIDIA actually loading instead of sulking at boot. This is the cleaned-up version of what I ended up doing. I am keeping the install part short and the Secure Boot plus NVIDIA part upfront, because that was the part that consumed the time. ...