shell

Caelestia replaces the whole desktop interface on a Linux machine running Hyprland: bar, app launcher, notifications, lock screen, dashboard, sidebar, wallpaper switcher and on-screen brightness and audio popups, as one animated shell instead of separate tools like waybar, rofi and dunst. Free under GPL-3.0.

It's built on Quickshell (a toolkit for writing desktop widgets in Qt's QML language) plus a compiled C++ plugin, so it's more than a config file. Arch users install caelestia-shell from the AUR and Nix users can nix run it; everyone else installs a long dependency list, including the git build of Quickshell, and compiles with CMake. Settings live in ~/.config/caelestia/shell.json, with per-monitor overrides. Development is active, with commits most weeks and v2.5.0 tagged in September.

No paid tier, just a Ko-fi. Solo: free, and it's a personal setup, not something you roll out. Teams: nothing to standardize here.

The catch: it's built around Hyprland, and the full experience assumes Caelestia's own dotfiles and CLI, so you're adopting someone's entire desktop opinion. Releases rename and remove config options, and tweaking past the JSON means reading QML.