[dfc]

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?

[dmit]

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.

[ankurdhama]

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.

[sbinnee]

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?

[Valodim]

I'm not sure about Linux, but on Windows it's been called that since forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell

[tvshtr]

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