DMS 2.1 Stormborn

DMS 2.1

Stormborn

DMS 2.1 "Stormborn" is here, two weeks after 2.0. It adds an interface density setting, the DMS Classic style, a reworked media player and system monitor, video wallpapers, new on-screen displays, Fedora Atomic support in the Dux installer, updates across Dux Files, Dux Calendar, Dux GOP, Dux Search, and Dux Greeter, and deeper niri, Hyprland, and mangowm support. It also moves installs and updates onto the new Dux Labs repositories: see .

DMS is Dux Modular Shell

With 2.0, DankMaterialShell became Dux Shell. In 2.1 the name grows into the three letters everyone already uses: Dux Modular Shell, or DMS for short. The dms command, config paths, IPC, and plugins all stay the same, so there is nothing to change on your end. Modular because that's how it's built: plugins, Dash tabs and cards, two interface styles, and sibling apps like Dux Search, Dux Calendar, and Dux GOP that you can take or leave.

Interface density

Shell surfaces now follow an interface density setting. Text and search fields scale with it too, so you can run DMS roomy or compact. Pick Spacious, Comfortable, Compact, or Dense in Settings → Interface style. Comfortable is the default, and sizes you changed yourself are left alone.

DMS Classic

Not into the Expressive shapes? DMS Classic drops the pills and the press morphing for one corner radius on every control, and Settings gets plain icons and continuous grouped cards. Switch in Settings → Interface style → Style.

Media player and lyrics

The media player gets an Expressive redesign, the Bento layout is reworked, and lyrics gain new features (apollo79). Synced lyrics can also show in the island's media slot (PandorasFox).

• Bento: a squiggly seekbar, shuffle, repeat, lyrics, and output in one row, and the output and player pickers slide in as sheets.
• Album art: new Swaying Square and Spinning Record shapes, and an option to draw the title and controls on filled cards in Bento.
• Lyrics: smooth word fill, an indicator for instrumental breaks, and smoother scrolling.
• Island lyrics: turn on Lyrics in the island's Behavior card under Settings → Bar.

System monitor

The system monitor window has been reworked (Conava). Processes, Performance, Disks, and System now sit in a side rail.

• Processes: more columns, a details view per process, and quit, force quit, and restart from the row or right-click menu.
• Performance: a page per device with live graphs.
• Disks: health and SMART values per drive, without waking sleeping disks.
• System: copy a summary or a Markdown report for bug reports, with no hostname, user, or network names in it.

Video wallpapers

The shell can now play video wallpapers (KadirJeager). Pick an mp4, webm, mkv, mov, m4v, or avi like any other wallpaper, or run dms ipc call wallpaper set /path/to/video.mp4.

• Playback uses Qt Multimedia with its ffmpeg backend.
• It pauses while locked, with a fullscreen window on that screen, or with the screens off.
• ffmpeg is optional. Without it there's no thumbnail and no wallpaper-based colors.
• Advance when a video ends in the cycling settings moves on to the next wallpaper instead of looping.

New on-screen displays

• Keyboard layout: an OSD when you switch layouts (Huỳnh Thiện Lộc). Off by default, turn it on in Settings → On-screen displays.
• Num Lock: an indicator when Num Lock changes (Huỳnh Thiện Lộc).
• Input method: an OSD when fcitx5 switches input methods (DaniCatGames).

Dash

• A live user info card.
• The clock card's font weight can be adjusted to match the desktop and lock screen clocks.
• The settings shortcut is back in the tab bar.
• Keyboard navigation: the tab row switches tabs while the arrow keys work the content, and Ctrl+Tab steps between them. See keyboard navigation.
• The island can show the Dash tab bar on its faces.

Audio cards

Audio cards can now be turned off and on from DMS (cmleon51). Each output in Settings → Sound & media → Audio has a power button, and disabled cards move to their own list so you can turn them back on.

Administrator lock settings

Administrators can opt in to locking down lock screen settings, and DMS enforces the managed values (alvarosth). See Administrator lock policy.

The Dux suite

The apps around DMS moved too.

Dux Files

• Folder appearance: give a folder a color, a different icon, or a badge. Right-click it and pick Folder appearance (is-suzart).
• Previews: full-window preview for images and PDFs (is-suzart).
• Game libraries show up in the sidebar (is-suzart).
• View: zoom from the View menu, resizable columns, and an option to hide the window header (is-suzart). Hide sidebar sections you don't use (phantomeye1931).
• Settings: density follows DMS, with a new Dense level. Also a file extensions toggle, hidden files sorted last, window opacity and blur, and an opener that hands files to xdg-open.
• Network and devices: SMB servers list their shares, phones and cameras show up without a gvfs client running, and davs mounts work.

See Dux Files.

Dux Calendar

• Window opacity, foreground layers, and compositor blur.
• Follows your DMS fonts.
• Google calendars keep syncing when the Tasks API quota runs out (LazyWare), plus CalDAV sync fixes (alin742).

See Dux Calendar.

Dux GOP

Dux GOP feeds the new system monitor: sensors, memory modules, per-process GPU, VRAM, disk, and network, and network link info (Conava). CPU temperature now works on ARM boards (junknewera).

See Dux GOP.

Dux Search

Dux Search skips symlinks that loop back into a parent folder, and its HTTP API is now off by default. See .

Dux Greeter

• Remembers each user's session: pick a user and the greeter preselects the session that account used last, so people sharing a machine each land in their own desktop. See Remembered user and session.
• Multiple screens: every screen shows the same login prompt, security key wait, and error message, instead of only the primary one.
• No more flashes: Dux Greeter holds a black cover until your synced settings and theme have loaded, and session output goes to the journal instead of the login VT.
• Password field: Ctrl+A selects the whole password, and input methods treat it as hidden text.
• Reliability: security key and other PAM prompts no longer time out under greetd, and auto-login still starts when its cache can't be read.
• Fedora Atomic: Dux Greeter installs on Fedora Atomic and bootc images.

Wallpaper Generator

The Wallpaper Generator gets a color scheme picker and exact Material color math (apollo79).

niri

niri is the compositor we drive every day, so DMS 2.1 already supports everything coming in niri's next stable release. DMS asks the installed niri once with niri validate and only shows the newer options when your niri accepts them, so niri 26.04 keeps working as it does today.

• Keyboard shortcuts: Release and Non-consuming bind options, and binds on a lone modifier. On the next release, tapping Mod on its own toggles the overview and Mod+Shift+? opens the cheatsheet.
• Window rules: VRR Fullscreen Only, On activation (Focus, Ignore, or Mark urgent), and Pinch sensitivity.
• Input and displays: touchpad pinch sensitivity and Max bits per channel for each output.
• Conflict detection understands modifier order and left and right modifiers, so it catches the same clashes niri does.
• Bar: overlay bars animate out when a window goes fullscreen (steven12138).

The binds that depend on your niri version live in dms/binds-next.kdl, which DMS keeps up to date, and dms doctor warns if your config.kdl doesn't include it. See Next niri release.

Hyprland

2.1 is Lua only. Hyprland 0.57 reads nothing but hyprland.lua, so DMS has dropped legacy hyprland.conf support entirely and reads and writes Lua on every Hyprland it supports, from 0.55 up. See to switch over.

• Hyprland 0.57: the remaining gaps are closed. Screenshots are no longer rotated twice, and dms doctor warns when Quickshell is too old for 0.57's named and special workspaces, when your config uses deprecated options, and when Dux Greeter isn't on Lua yet.
• Wobbly windows: damping, mass, and mesh sit next to intensity and stiffness in Settings → System & integrations → Hyprland (alamin147).
• Monitor profiles are written with desc: identifiers, so they follow a display across ports.
• Keybinds: dms setup refreshes binds.lua even when you keep your main config, Lua function binds land in the right cheatsheet category, and DMS warns when an action is missing its arguments.
• Dock: hides for floating windows you move or resize with keybinds.

See Hyprland.

mangowm

DMS now works natively with both mangowm config formats. Keep config.conf or move to config.toml: DMS finds and repairs its includes in either, without creating a config.conf that would shadow your TOML file, and the cheatsheet, window rules, and monitor rules read TOML directly. Bind conflicts are checked per key mode, and bindc is honored.

DMS also targets mangowm 0.18 and newer only. The pre-0.18 key names and DMS's own translation layer for them are gone, along with dms config mango-migrate. See .

• Workspace apps stay on their own monitor (tomups).
• mangowm no longer runs its layer animations on DMS surfaces, so the shell's own animations play clean.

See mangowm.

Dux installer on Fedora Atomic

duxinstall now supports immutable Fedora: Silverblue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx, Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, Zirconium, and other rpm-ostree or bootc images based on Fedora.

curl -fsSL https://install.duxlabs.dev | sh

On an image it never runs a package command or asks for a password. It checks what the image already has, prints the rpm-ostree install commands for anything missing, and stops. Layer the packages, reboot, and run it again: it picks up your earlier choices and deploys the configuration into your home directory. Switching between stable and git builds prints the matching rpm-ostree swap the same way, and headless mode (-c, -t, -y) works on images too. The greeter isn't set up for you on an image; the installer prints the dms-greeter install --yes command to run afterwards.

The installer can also set up Dux Files now. See Fedora Atomic & bootc images.

Dux Dot

Dux Dot gets major performance and stability improvements. Dragging, flinging, and opening the dot now run on a single surface, so it stays smooth on every compositor, Hyprland and mangowm will see the largest gains in this one, while niri becomes smoother overall. Settings also gain an icon picker for the dot.

More in 2.1

• Clock: per-widget click action, with the overview as an option, and an option to hide AM/PM in 12-hour mode.
• Bar: widgets can set an overflow priority (colonelpanic8).
• Screenshots: the region selector snaps to the island (Huỳnh Thiện Lộc).
• Theming: themable tooltip surface colors (Huỳnh Thiện Lộc), live GTK4 refresh, and themed GTK sidebars.
• Context menus: follow the M3 Expressive menu spec (Tear4Pixelation).
• Notification center: right-click or long-press the header buttons to choose which appear and where.
• Dock: choose whether middle-click closes the window or opens a new instance (Huỳnh Thiện Lộc).
• Widget editor: hold Shift to resize as a square (Huỳnh Thiện Lộc).
• Battery: scaled battery level display (Huỳnh Thiện Lộc).
• Brightness: pin devices on screen and group them so they move together. See brightness.
• Lock screen: Settings → Security → Lock screen shows a live preview of your lock layout over the lock wallpaper, with its blur and fill mode.
• Power menu: reboot into firmware setup (matthewyjiang).
• Weather: MET Norway as a provider, with an ordered fallback list when one is unavailable (joshii-h).
• Launcher: Ctrl+N and Ctrl+P move by item in dmenu mode (colonelpanic8).
• System updates: a "never" option for the update check interval.

Fixes and polish

2.0 shipped two weeks ago, and 2.1 already carries 100+ bug fixes and 30+ quality-of-life and polish changes. Some of the ones you may notice:

View Details

• Notification popups no longer stop showing after you close them, keep their content while they animate out, and relative times stay current on the lock screen, in the notifications tab, and in history.
• Clipboard history and wellbeing data are no longer lost when two sessions run at once.
• Fingerprint unlock arms only after the compositor confirms the lock, and input methods treat the lock screen password as hidden text.
• Suspend is retried when a logind sleep inhibitor is released.
• The reboot-to-OS picker lists inactive EFI boot entries.
• Displays on niri no longer overlap their neighbors at fractional scales, VRR stays on after you choose On, and the shell uses the live output scale instead of the one from startup.
• The bar no longer jumps when a far-edge island expands, reserves island space only when the island isn't floating, and no longer cuts off pill text by a subpixel.
• The dock no longer magnifies while hidden, lists widgets in Settings in its real order, keeps long window titles on one line, keeps its spring animation stable at short animation speeds, and hides for floating windows moved or resized by Hyprland keybinds.
• The screenshot region selector receives input on multi-seat setups and keeps your last region at any scale.
• Links on iwd with systemd-networkd are classified correctly and show when they disconnect, Wi-Fi networks using OWE connect as open networks without a password prompt, wired profiles refresh when their settings change, new Wi-Fi profiles are owned per user when system changes aren't allowed, and OpenVPN dynamic challenge prompts work.
• Tray icons resolve from theme subdirectories and the system theme, stay on screen while a new icon loads, and overflow menus open at the icon.
• Lyrics no longer trust a stale player position after a track change, and the audio visualizer no longer drags the PipeWire quantum down.
• Theme generation skips runs whose inputs haven't changed and no longer waits on hooks, colors reload once matugen finishes, user templates survive a config.toml without a [config] table, and GTK4 light and dark switches apply live.
• Edits made in place to settings persist, an unversioned settings file is read as the current format, and week day names follow your locale.
• Flatpak updates are hidden when Flatpak is excluded, and listed when one needs a runtime you don't have yet.
• Workspace indicators, dock tooltips, app icons, and the lock screen are faster, the control center no longer stalls reloading avatars and icons, and the battery pulse is capped at 20fps.
• Plugins that fail to load are retried with a fresh component, plugin manifest paths can't point outside the plugin directory, and plugin installs over SSH no longer fail on newer known_hosts key types.
• The system monitor shows passthrough GPUs as unavailable, and brightness ignores kernel-triggered indicator LEDs.
• Weather keeps the location name you searched for when custom coordinates are reapplied, the plugin browser opens quickly on slow connections, and the launcher's file mode notices Dux Search once it's installed.
• Ctrl+A selects all text in lock screen fields.
• The updater confirms installs on Enter and keeps the upgrade log in view, and a second click on a control center tile closes its band.
• The installer no longer depends on the GitHub API, dms doctor matches font names the way Qt lists them, and the backend builds with Go 1.27.3 for CVE-2026-111943.
• ...and many more.

Upgrade Notes

Move to the Dux Labs repositories

Everyone on a packaged install needs this one. As 2.0 promised, the AvengeMedia and DankLinux package repositories are being retired. A full set of Dux Labs repositories has been built out in parallel with them, covering Arch and the AUR, COPR, Open Build Service, Void, and Ubuntu's Launchpad PPAs, and from 2.1 installs and updates come from Dux Labs.

Run this once after updating

dms migrate dux

It lists every repository it will move and asks before it changes anything. Add --dry-run to only print the commands. It's safe to run again: repositories that already moved are skipped.

Arch and the AUR aren't covered by dms migrate dux: there's no repository to switch, because the packages themselves carry the Dux names (dux-shell in extra, dux-shell-git and dux-greeter-bin in the AUR). pacman -Syu swaps dms-shell for dux-shell on its own. AUR packages need a manual swap:

paru -S dux-shell-git
paru -Rns greetd-dms-greeter-bin && paru -S dux-greeter-bin && dms-greeter install

Only repositories you have enabled are touched. Afterwards, dms doctor shows whether any legacy repositories are left. The full list of commands for each distribution is in Migrate repositories.

The Dux installer now installs from the Dux Labs repositories too.

Hyprland: Lua config only

DMS no longer reads or manages hyprland.conf and needs Hyprland 0.55 or newer. Nothing is converted for you: dms setup writes a fresh hyprland.lua and the dms/*.lua fragments, backing up any existing hyprland.lua first, and leaves your old hyprland.conf in place, unused. Re-add your shortcuts, window rules, and displays from Settings or dms/binds-user.lua. See Coming from hyprland.conf.

mangowm 0.18 or newer

mangowm 0.18 renamed its config keys to snake_case (exec-once is now exec_once, windowrule is window_rule, and so on), and DMS now writes only the new names. dms config mango-migrate is gone: run the migrate-config-keys.sh from mangowm's 0.18.0 release over ~/.config/mango instead. If you ran that script from a timer or cron job to keep up with DMS, remove it. dms doctor lists any keys mangowm still rejects.

Dux Search: HTTP API off by default

Dux Search no longer serves its HTTP API unless you ask. DMS and the dsearch CLI use the socket, so nothing changes for most setups. If you script against the HTTP API, set http_enabled = true. See configuration.

The people behind it

DMS was founded by bbedward and purian23. We're grateful for the passion and contributions from each Huỳnh Thiện Lộc, apollo79, and georgestafilidis, whose design ideas and code show up all over the shell. Thank you to everyone else contributing code, plugins, translations, packaging, testing, and bug reports.

A special thank you to everyone who supports Dux Labs through GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi. Your support keeps this project going, and we're grateful for every one of you! Meet them on our new sponsors page, and everyone who has built DMS with us on the contributors page.

New plugins

Plugin authors published 20 new plugins since 2.0. The most upvoted so far:

• Cast by Conava: mirror your screen to Chromecast, Google TV, and AirPlay devices, and play files, playlists, and links on Chromecast.
• Waywallen Theme Sync by Douzend: syncs DMS colors with the wallpaper playing in Waywallen.
• Sticky Notes by iSparsh: handwritten-style paper notes you peel off and stick anywhere on your desktop.
• Inline Keyboard by LilFishyChan: an on-screen touch keyboard with input-method candidates drawn inside it.
• Presentation Hub by Miho1254: moves presentation windows to an audience display and manages the session.
• Fcitx5 Indicator by Nixie24: shows the active Fcitx5 input method in the bar.

Browse and upvote them all on the plugins page.

Community Contributions

257 commits from 37 contributors to DMS since 2.0, including 87 community pull requests from 35 people, plus 22 more pull requests from 12 people across the rest of the Dux suite. Time for a callout:

Huỳnh Thiện Lộc landed 23 pull requests across DMS, Dux QML Common, and the first-party plugins, including the screenshot selector's island snap targets, themable tooltip colors, the keyboard layout OSD and Num Lock indicator, square resizing in the widget editor, the dock's middle-click setting, and a long run of dock, dash, screenshot, and OSD fixes.

Also: performance work on workspace indicators, dock tooltips, and the lock screen, plus synced lyrics in the island (PandorasFox), the reworked system monitor (Conava), the Expressive media player and lyrics features (apollo79), video wallpapers (KadirJeager), seven fixes across the dock, settings, brightness, and privacy indicators (Mario-Mohar), and administrator lock settings (alvarosth).

Across the suite: folder appearance, previews, game libraries, and view options in Dux Files (is-suzart), sidebar sections (phantomeye1931), calendar sync fixes (LazyWare, alin742), build docs (mattmars3), and ARM CPU temperatures in Dux GOP (junknewera).

All Contributions

Translators

Translators on POEditor added 5,100+ new translations across 12 languages this release. Thank you!

Want to see DMS in your language? Join the POEditor project.

Thanks also to the package maintainers, plugin and theme authors, and everyone testing builds and reporting bugs. If we missed you, let us know on Discord or GitHub.

Resources

Get started with DMS → GitHubDocumentationDux FilesPlugins & themesWallpapersDiscordSupport on Ko-fi Special thanks toYaLTeR and the niri community for their continued support and collaboration.

Thank you.

To everyone contributing code, translations, plugins, packaging, feedback, sponsorships, and donations. DMS is here because of you.