DMS is a pretty good gateway drug out of major DEs and into WMs like Niri. I had already started using Niri but the base DMS configuration has a lot more batteries included so I switched and so far haven't had any major complaints.
If you consider the extras built into noctalia: notifications, screen lock (i think), wallpaper daemon .... daemons you have to install/configure piecemeal, noctalia is already in the ballpark of a waybar-based setup.
Haha, dude, the stuff we used to do when we were young. Transparent conky on the desktop showing a bunch of graphs that drive their own selves up. Spinning cubes to get workspaces. Loved it. And ran it on absolutely garbage hardware too.
It will always be uncool to do this stuff, and I will always be there for it.
That sounds like a pretty big minus. Not hard to learn with LLMs doing everything. Pretty easy to replicate dotfiles with flakes that's why most of them use it. Since you claim it's a benefit, but I've already learned it, no point to using this. Seems like a worse docker.
I've been really enjoying using DMS as a daily driver. I had been partial to Cosmic DE, but the overall visual appearance, pace of development, and ecosystem around DMS made me switch.
In Linux you generally have two types of desktops: DEs, which are full featured (KDE, GNOME, Cosmic, Cinnamon, etc.), and window managers. Window managers do only what they say on the tin, if you used one with genuinely no config (they usually have minor defaults to prevent this) you would be completely soft-locked: an empty desktop just a cursor to play with, no way to launch apps, nothing.
They have a special layer into which apps can spawn windows that typically do things like adding a launcher, or an app switcher, notifications, or whatever else you want. It's the unix philosophy brought to the UI domain. Usually you have a separate app for each, but DMS brings in a full suite: allowing you to use the window manager without having to spend hours ricing your system.
a vibe-coded "shell", which is a term that has evolved to describe a suite of software that does all the desktop-environment stuff that you don't get when you use an X11 window manager or Wayland compositor that isn't part of a bigger desktop ecosystem.
