noctalia

Noctalia v5 + LabWC + Artix Linux: A Modern Linux Desktop Under 500MB

Luigi

• 1 min read

Noctalia Shell v5 is a complete rewrite of the original Noctalia project. The developer stripped it down to the essentials — and the numbers speak for themselves:

  • ~500 MB RAM on a cold boot
  • ~165 MB RAM at idle (without recording)
  • ~900 MB RAM while screen recording

For context: that's lower than most lightweight Xfce or LXQt setups, and dramatically lower than GNOME or KDE Plasma (which often idle at 1.5–3 GB).

Key Features

  • Fluid animations — despite the tiny footprint, the UI is smooth and animated
  • Full visual configuration — panel position, dock, colors, scaling, corner settings, all from a GUI
  • Built-in services — weather widget, night light (redshift), application lifecycle hooks
  • Wayland native — runs on LabWC, a stacking Wayland compositor
  • Extensible — supports custom commands and per-application lifecycle events

The Catch (It's a Dev Version)

v5 is not yet released — it lives on the v5 branch of the Noctalia GitHub repo. A few rough edges:

  • Pinning apps to the dock requires manually specifying the desktop entry ID (e.g., org.kitty.kitty or org.nemo.Nemo)
  • Old extensions are broken — v5 is a from-scratch rewrite, so community extensions from v4 won't work
  • Config format changed — you'll need to recreate settings from scratch
  • Still experimental — but reportedly stable in daily use

Building It Yourself

Dependencies (on Arch / Artix):

meson wayland wayland-protocols
gtk3 gtk-layer-shell glibmm
jsoncpp libdbusmenu-gtk3

Build:

meson setup build --prefix=/usr
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

Then run noctalia as your Wayland compositor session.

Why This Matters

We've been told for years that a "modern" desktop needs systemd, 2 GB of RAM, and a GPU from this decade. Noctalia v5 + LabWC + Artix prove otherwise. This is a production-viable, modern, Wayland-native desktop that could run on a Raspberry Pi 4 or a 10-year-old ThinkPad.

If you care about software freedom and resource efficiency, keep an eye on this project.

References