danklinux

Dank Linux (dms & dankinstall)

A comprehensive installer and management tool for DankMaterialShell, a modern desktop environment built with Quickshell & GO for Wayland compositors.

• dms Enriched shell runner
  • Manages dbus connection for NetworkManager, loginctl, accountsservice, and other interfaces.
  • Exposes a json socket for interaction with these interfaces
  • Provides plugin management APIs for the shell
  • Optionally provides update interface - depending on build inputs.
    • This is intended to be disabled when packaged as part of distribution packages.
• dankinstall Installs the Dank Linux suite for niri and/or Hyprland
  • Features the DankMaterialShell
    • Which features a complete desktop experience with wallpapers, auto theming, notifications, lock screen, etc.
  • Offers up solid out of the box configurations as usable, featured starting points.
  • Can be installed if you already have niri/Hyprland configured
    • Will allow you to keep your existing config, or replace with Dank ones (existing configs always backed up though)

dms-cli

A part of the DankMaterialShell, that is provided by this repository. It is written in GO, and exposes a suite of APIs over unix socket that interface with dbus via godbus and also the plugin system.

Build & Install

To build the dms CLI (Requires Go 1.24+):

For distribution package maintainers

This produces a build without the update or greeter functionality, which are intended for manual installation.

make dist

Produces bin/dms-linux-amd64 and bin/dms-linux-arm64

Manual Install

# Installs to /usr/local/bin/dms
make && sudo make install

Dank Linux/dankinstall

Equivalent to installing "dotfiles", but less intrusive as we don't modify anything on the system besides installing some packages and configuring user-level niri and terminal configurations.

Quickstart

curl -fsSL https://install.danklinux.com | sh

Alternatively, download the latest release

Supported Distributions

Note on Greeter: dankinstall does not install a greeter automatically.

• To install the dms greeter, run dms greeter install after installation.
• Then you can disable any existing greeter, if present, and run sudo systemctl enable --now greetd

Arch Linux & Derivatives

Supported: Arch, ArchARM, Archcraft, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Manjaro

Special Notes:

• Uses native pacman for system packages
• AUR packages are built manually using makepkg (no AUR helper dependency)
• Recommendations
  • Use NetworkManager to manage networking
  • If using archinstall, you can choose minimal for profile, and NetworkManager under networking.

Package Sources:

Fedora & Derivatives

Supported: Fedora, Nobara, Fedora Asahi Remix

Special Notes:

• Requires dnf-plugins-core for COPR repository support
• Automatically enables required COPR repositories
• All COPR repos are enabled with automatic acceptance
• Editions dankinstall is tested on "Workstation Edition", but probably works fine on any fedora flavor. Report issues if anything doesn't work.
• Fedora Asahi Remix hasn't been tested, but presumably it should work fine as all of the dependencies should provide arm64 variants.

Package Sources:

Ubuntu

Supported: Ubuntu 25.04+

Special Notes:

• Requires PPA support via software-properties-common
• Go installed from PPA for building manual packages
• Most packages require manual building due to limited repository availability
  • This means the install can be quite slow, as many need to be compiled from source.
  • niri is packages as a .deb so it can be managed via apt
• Automatic PPA repository addition and package list updates

Package Sources:

Debian

Supported: Debian 13+ (Trixie)

Special Notes:

• niri only - Debian does not support Hyprland currently, only niri.
• Most packages require manual building due to limited repository availability
  • This means the install can be quite slow, as many need to be compiled from source.
  • niri is packages as a .deb so it can be managed via apt

Package Sources:

openSUSE Tumbleweed

Special Notes:

• Most packages available in standard repos, minimal manual building required
• quickshell and matugen require building from source

Package Sources:

NixOS (Not supported by Dank Linux, but with Flake)

NixOS users should use the dms flake

Manual Package Building

The installer handles manual package building for packages not available in repositories:

quickshell (Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE)

• Built from source using cmake
• Requires Qt6 development libraries
• Automatically handles build dependencies
• openSUSE: Uses special CFLAGS with rpm optflags and wayland include path

matugen (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE)

• Built from Rust source
• Requires cargo and rust toolchain
• Installed to /usr/local/bin

dgop (All distros)

• Built from Go source
• Simple dependency-free build
• Installed to /usr/local/bin

niri (Ubuntu, Debian)

• Built from Rust source
• Requires cargo and rust toolchain
• Complex build with multiple dependencies

Commands

dankinstall

Main installer with interactive TUI for initial setup

dms

Management interface for DankMaterialShell:

• dms - Interactive management TUI
• dms run - Start interactive shell
• dms run -d - Start shell as daemon
• dms restart - Restart running DMS shell
• dms kill - Kill running DMS shell processes
• dms ipc <command> - Send IPC commands to running shell