A wallpaper-driven Material You desktop shell for Niri, built with Quickshell and Qt 6.
Important
SownteeShell is my personal Arch Linux and Niri setup. It is tuned around my workflow, hardware, and services, so treat it as a showcase and reference implementation rather than a supported drop-in desktop.
Note
Video showcase coming soon.
SownteeShell is the desktop UI and runtime layer of my Niri session: bar, Dock, launcher, control panels, notifications, wallpapers, capture tools, Settings, lock screen, greeter, OSDs, and system integration.
Every surface shares one Material Design 3 language, wallpaper-derived colors, compositor-backed blur, typography, motion, and state. Large interfaces are loaded only when opened, while system services follow their actual consumers instead of polling permanently.
- Niri-native workspace model with live windows, dynamic workspaces, overview-aware focus, drag reordering, cross-workspace movement without focus stealing, per-workspace tiled/floating state, and multi-monitor support.
- Dynamic Dock for pinned and running applications, with drag ordering, live window previews, focus-aware unread badges, right-click pinning, and overlap-aware auto-hide.
- Launcher and All Apps with fuzzy application search, a full-screen paged grid, horizontal touchpad navigation, keyboard control, contextual app actions, package-aware Pacman/Flatpak uninstall, and persistent drag-and-drop folders with rename and drag-out ungrouping.
- Search providers for files (
f), clipboard (c), calculator (=), a unified emoji/Unicode catalog (e), and lazy KLIPY GIF (g) or sticker (s) grids when an API key is configured. Clipboard history supports pinned text, URLs, colors, file lists, images, and video thumbnails with optional direct paste. - Configurable bar with workspaces, active client, media and Cava, weather, battery, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microphone privacy, recording, notifications, clock, and StatusNotifier items.
- Left panel with Vietnamese lunar calendar, Google Calendar events, local and Google Tasks, timed task indicators, OpenWeather forecasts with GeoClue location detection, synced lyrics, media controls, and countdown timers.
- A standalone, responsive SownteeShell Calendar with week and month views, drag-to-create time ranges, all-day events, event editing, and unified account/calendar filtering.
- Calendar sync for Google, Microsoft, and iCloud, backed by a dedicated Rust daemon with a local SQLite cache, background and manual sync, Secret Service credentials, and critical notifications 30 minutes before events.
- Right panel with notification history, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth management, advanced IPv4/IPv6 profiles, Wi-Fi QR sharing, AirPods L/R/Case battery data, and a PipeWire per-application mixer with peak meters and device routing.
- Display control with drag-and-drop arrangement, orientation, mode, resolution, refresh rate, scale, startup focus, VRR (
Off,On,On Demand), internal/external display presets, DDC/CI brightness, and Sunshine output selection. - System telemetry with battery health and supported charge thresholds, power profiles,
auto-cpufreq, Arch/AUR/Flatpak updates, live CPU/RAM/GPU charts, grouped process management, and RSS/PSS memory details. - Quick controls for Airplane Mode, Caffeine, DND, night light, power profiles, Tailscale, and Cloudflare WARP, with edge-drag access to both panels.
- A searchable, responsive, resizable SownteeShell Settings window that behaves like a regular Niri application.
- GUI editors for Niri keybindings, layout, input, animations, behavior, window and layer rules, and raw configuration files.
- Shell controls for typography, bar modules, launcher providers, notifications, wallpapers, capture, integrations, audio, OSDs, idle behavior, and performance.
- Per-surface blur, light/dark surface opacity, separate panel/component shadows, reduced motion, low-power mode, dependency diagnostics, and scoped cache cleanup.
- A shared profile image for Settings, Polkit, and Greetd, plus Howdy face-model management when supported.
- Static images, GIFs, and local videos, with video playback isolated in a separate Quickshell renderer process so its multimedia memory is reclaimed when playback stops.
- Wallpaper Engine support routes video projects through the native renderer and scene projects through
linux-wallpaperengine, with battery-aware FPS and pause-on-lock/fullscreen policies. - Integrated Wallhaven and Steam Workshop browsers with search, source-specific filters, favorites, installed-library management, cached previews, and desktop/Greetd/both destinations.
- Frame-aware video handoff, cached covers, rollback-safe transitions, and synchronized live theme previews while browsing.
- Matugen-generated Material You colors with animated shell transitions and optional theme propagation through configured system templates.
- Greetd keeps its own background and palette, generated independently from its selected image or Wallpaper Engine video.
- A layered screenshot editor with pen, highlighter, lines, arrows, shapes, text, numbered markers, blur, pixelation, crop, eraser, zoom callouts, and a magnifier loupe.
- Transformable annotations and inserted image layers with move, crop, resize, rotate, opacity, visibility, z-order, edge snapping, automatic stitching, color picking, undo, and redo.
- English/Vietnamese OCR, Google Lens reverse image search, automatic clipboard export, and screenshot actions directly from the notification popup.
- GPU screen recording with region selection, configurable FPS/codec/quality, optional microphone capture, and CPU-encoding fallback.
- Grouped notification popups with application actions, priority-aware timeouts, configurable placement, direction-aware stacking, swipe dismissal, persistent history, scheduled DND, lock-screen delivery, exclusions, and retention controls.
- A standalone Quickshell Greetd interface on Cage with installed-session discovery, network status, animated battery state, profile sync, and wallpaper-derived colors.
- Multi-monitor PAM lock screen with password authentication, optional Howdy face recognition, retry after monitor wake, media, and notifications.
- Native Polkit dialogs, session and power menus, idle dim/lock/monitor-off policy, Caffeine inhibition, and position-aware volume, brightness, microphone, and media OSDs.
- On-demand QML surfaces, event-driven Niri/PipeWire/NetworkManager/UPower integration, a native image-cache provider, and persistent Rust Core and Calendar services with direct IPC, bounded jobs, and systemd-managed lifecycles.
After the runtime dependencies are available, launch the project from its root directory:
./run-sownteeshellrun-sownteeshell prepares the native image-cache plugin, configures the local QML import path and allocator behavior, then launches shell.qml.
The Core and Calendar daemons run as systemd user services and remain available across Quickshell reloads. See backend/README.md for backend details and health-check commands.
shell.qml Entry point, IPC, screen variants, and lazy surfaces
Config.qml Shared theme values and persisted runtime settings
StateManager.qml Cross-surface state and open/close coordination
widget/ Bar, Dock, panels, desktop, capture, session, and Settings
components/ Reusable MD3 controls, effects, editors, and popups
service/ System, media, productivity, capture, and wallpaper services
backend/ Rust Core/Calendar services and on-demand Python/native helpers
plugin/ Native QML image-cache provider
scripts/ Shell integrations grouped by capture, connectivity, power, and theme
The Niri Settings pages target the include-based configuration used by this setup; they are not intended as a generic editor for every possible Niri file layout. Runtime settings and shell-owned caches are stored under $XDG_CACHE_HOME/sownteeshell with ~/.cache/sownteeshell as the fallback; Quickshell's own QML, shader, pipeline, and crash caches remain under its native cache directory. API keys and account credentials are intentionally absent from source defaults.
The main stack includes Niri, quickshell-git, Qt 6, Rust/Cargo, PipeWire/WirePlumber, NetworkManager, UPower, Matugen, wl-clipboard, cliphist, FFmpeg, ImageMagick, and the capture utilities.
Optional or hardware-dependent features use Tesseract language data, GeoClue, Cava, gpu-screen-recorder, DDC/CI, Steam and linux-wallpaperengine, Howdy and V4L2, Tailscale, or Cloudflare WARP. Settings → Advanced → Dependencies reports which integrations are currently available.
Charge thresholds, external brightness, hardware video acceleration, face authentication, and device-specific battery telemetry depend on the machine and its drivers.
Design and workflow inspiration comes from DankMaterialShell, end-4's dots and Caelestia Shell.
Built on the work of the Niri, Quickshell, and Matugen communities.