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by dfc 142 days ago
At first I thought "desktop shell" was supposed to be compositor, but that's not the case, a wayland compositor like sway is a requirement. I've been using sway for years I have no idea what a "shell" is? It's somewhere in between a desktop environment and a theme?
4 comments

Yes. It occupies the spot in the Sway tutorials that recommend you "waybar, fuzzel, tofi, [etc]" to fill out the necessities. Noctalia, DMS, and other Quickshell projects cover that void.
Usually a Wayland compositor just do very few things like compose different program windows to your display output and feed the focused window input events. Desktop elements like wallpaper, panel/dock etc are considered part of "desktop shell". Gnome have mutter as compositor and gnome-shell as shell (although they are same process). KDE has Kwin as compositor and plasma-shell as desktop shell.
I have no idea what shell means either! Isn’t it called ricing to customize desktop environment? Since when do people started calling it shell?
I'm not sure about Linux, but on Windows it's been called that since forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell
I wonder where where LiteStep is at

used it (and sometimes SharpE) for a number of years until about idk 20y ago

http://litestep.net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep

https://reddit.com/r/LiteStep/comments/1fjnj9y/litestep_revi...

https://sharpe.sourceforge.net

Noctalia (it's quickshell theme/env underneath) is to compositor as KDE Plasma is to Kwin. Coincidentally both arr built on QtQuick.