I used to always bounce back and forth between Gnome, Plasma, Sway and Hyprland.
I love tiling compositors, but I also love having a fully functional desktop without stitching together two dozen different tools and configuring each separately. I got better things to do than edit text files for days.
And I think I found my holy grail: niri with Dank Material Shell.
DMS really is something else. A fully-fledged DE that sits on top of a tiling wayland compositor, with a workflow similar to Gnome and GUI customization options similar to Plasma.
I realize I’m shilling hard here, but I don’t even know the guy who made it. I’m just genuinely floored by the project’s quality.


I hate to be that guy but dev is vibe coding it. Check the .gitignore
Thank you for bringing this up! But, while you’ve clearly pointed out where to look at, it wasn’t quite enough for me to understand what exact content gave it away. Was it
I desire to learn this in the hopes of improving my vibe-code radar.
It wasn’t just the .gitignore to be honest, just a set of “rules” I have on a script I use to analyze repos (I may publish it eventually, although it would quickly become worthless plus it’s used at work to vet dependencies) and then just manual review of commits.
https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell/blob/293c2a0035119a87f831be856161138a5d36f437/.gitignore#L57
Ah, okay. I was looking at niri’s .gitignore 😅. But yeah, I can see it now. Thanks again!
I don’t know what that is or how to check it, and frankly I don’t care that much if they’re using AI.
I didn’t notice any bugs so far and I’m not relying on it for mission-critical work.
If I boycotted everything that’s made with AI help, I’d have to go back to Slackware.
You probably couldn’t boycott everything made with LLMs even if you went back to slackware. Firefox devs use it too (and for the love of god, no one attack the dev for it).
I don’t like it, consider it a liability, mentioned it to those who might care. I do appreciate your post nonetheless, not my cup of tea as an environment but I still liked the post.
There’s plenty of DEs made without AI slop.
AI is in the tool chain now whether you want it or not.
People who don’t use new tools get stuck behind.
If you find a carpenter who is bashing his nails in with a rock because he doesn’t trust hammers, or because blacksmithing is bad for the environment, you are going to be dealing with a shitty carpenter who is a lot slower and less effective than one who learned how to use a hammer.
The genie is out of the bottle. That much is not changing. Accept it, or be a Luddite. Quite literally, because that term comes from people who refused to accept that machines were taking over textile work.
Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.
The irony here is that the Luddites used machines. Nobody was weaving by hand in those days. Their grievance was not with machines in and of themselves, but with the machines being used to create an inferior product and oppress workers. Do you see the connection?
I don’t understand what this is even supposed to mean? Because there are AI tools, you’re forced to use them? Nah.
Nah. People who use AI slop churn out slop. People who actually write good code don’t use that shit at all because it just delays their progress.
A hammer doesn’t go around the house smashing windows as it builds the house. Its wielded by the carpenter and does exactly what they make it do.
Again, what is this supposed to mean?
AI is not a tool. A tool does what its wielder makes it do. AI just fucking wings it and makes shit up constantly and is wrong constantly.
I have heard this with NFTs, before that with crypto (and a dozen other more specific technologies before). It’s a terrible attitude.
No one has to accept shit even if it’s entrenched (see my other comment).
Are you referring to the CLAUDE files?